>I stand to be corrected, but I'm pretty sure that when I was playing around with CURSORTOXML a few days ago and set the flag to 0 - UTF-8 Formatted XML (default) - I was able to display the XML in IE...

The provider can specify the encoding as UTF-8 then throw a french e (with a slash on top) in into the XML. This is okay for normal XML processing, but will throw an error if you try display the raw HTML in IE. Normally you wouldn't display the raw HTML... that is unless you were trying to learn about this stuff... I need some sleep. :-)