this address the problem... but not the answer I was looking for. This tells me to go back in and address each instance. I was looking for a solution to take care of the wierd coding in the whole text field... not just one instance at a time.... Anybody got the scoop on this? thanks.

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[from Macromedia FlashSupportCenter]

Substitute special characters with URL encoding
One common technique used to load variables in Flash 4 is reading the data from a text file on the server (discussed in the Flash 4 manual "Using Flash," on page 183). This works well in most situations. However, there are certain characters that cannot be read directly from text.

Entering these characters in a text file read by Flash 4 may cause unusual results. These characters need to be URL encoded. URL encoding replaces the alphanumeric character with the hexadecimal combination which represents that character.