I've seen similar symptoms on the product pages when working with aolserver3.x. Sometimes caused by funny characters added to the product template, sometimes from data.
For data, our current fix is to:
1. Use a series of regsubs on the data to convert common characters to html entities etc.
2. manually "zap gremlins" (using bbedit) before importing data to ec.
It would be nice to have a filter/converter added to the bulk import and product-edit, product-add pages, but I'm not sure yet of the best approach to handle the various charsets.
Maybe something like this already exists in the forums package?
