I am able to reproduce this issue on the XHTML demo site: http://cutesoft.net/example/xmloutput.aspx On that page, supply this single line of text in the text entry box: This & That  Then click Submit. The produced output is:<div>This &amp;amp; That</div> Note that the text is incorrectly encoded, ...

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 ...