Public key with 142 characters? I've read that public keys that bitcoin uses have 130 characters (65 bytes), but on the page: http://blockexplorer.com/tx/7e9bf03454b9ff80974d39d02a8088154e60ee65726e239f70341366d1a1ccf7
I've found a public key: 30440220fe5322474a08626beac8fd44b9854fa3af52c14848993a9216b18b29793539f40220dd66a46dc1daa3d0d33fae22b7cc8ee3c753b062cc2e1a3be76183ee1f9dbbcb01 (140 characters), in addition the public key doesn't start with '04'.
There are a lot of keys with 140 characters. Is https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses wrong or have I missed something?
The public key is the 2nd word in the scriptSig but you're looking at the first word.  That's the signature.  Signatures are 71 to 73 bytes (142 to 146 characters) long.  I think you must have miscounted when you wrote that the one you found had 140 characters.

In the example you're looking at, the public key (i.e. the 2nd word in the scriptSig) is:

04
73769dda763e1f3f0ff1ca65343ed27279d73a63eaf88ca93714f0605d5d06bd
6d57cc6c3097909c5e0947341201d4960e4e16598687aa29c7b6c4675b7d66b6


and is 65 bytes long, as expected.