I've been lead to believe that that makes no difference.

Yes... but no. You probably saw a rendering error.

The private keys in question were only eight bits in length (decimal values 0 to 255). A proper key for the specific encryption should have been 384 bits, or about 116 decimal digits. If a string format function expects a 384 bit number, but only receives 8, it might fill out the missing places with zeroes.