> From: Mike Trotman [mailto:mike.trotman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 

> I have a similar (and maybe related) problem.
> 
> I am using a Perl CGI script on an IIS server with ADO and 
> MSXML. I perform a query on a (currently MS Access) database 
> containing 'memo' 
> [code snipped]
> I get an error as the XML is not well formed - containing illegal 
> characters from the 'memo' field
> (one of the ones I found was rendered as a bullet 'blob' in 
> MS Access).
> 

You should check to see what the characters involved are.  If, for
example, the Access database contains CP-1252 (Windows-specific)
characters, which is not uncommon, they will come out all wrong in
iso-8859-1 or utf-8. So you need to find out whether the problem is that
the declared encoding of the output does not match the actual encoding
(like utf-16 instead of utf-8), or whether it is just those characters
that aren't encoded or escaped properly.

Other than that, someone else will have to help with encoding issues
with ADO and perl, because I am an innocent in these areas.

Cheers,

Tom P