This is more of a post to document a "gotcha" that may have been seen by some others.

 

In v5.1 there was a documented bug for disappearing special characters after the post-back.  Thus, I upgraded to v5.3 with no results.  After much headache, I finally realized that ASP.NET by default encodes the response and request via UTF-8.  Most web developers (in attempt to achieve XHTML-Strict compliancy) are in the habit of either:

 

1.) Place in the web.config custom <globalization>.  In my case <globalization responseEncoding="iso-8859-1">

 

2.) Place at the top of your page or master template: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>

 

The solution is obviously to replace any instance of iso-8859-1 to utf-8 or 16.  I hope this helps anyone else out with the same issue...