canada post xml parsing error for quebec customers only

[p m]

getting an error message whenever a logged-in customer from quebec tries to checkout. where the canada post shipping options should be, it shows:

"XML parsing error.
If you prefer to use Canada Post as your shipping method, please contact the plastique monkey shop via Email."

this happened before, after canada post changed their IP address at the end of november 2006. i updated the IP address in the admin panel --> shipping --> canada post module, and everything seemed to work okay after that, until now.

the old canada post IP address was 216.191.36.73 . the new one is sellonline.canadapost.ca . both use server port 30000.

i've created a dummy customer account from quebec and reproduced the error message a customer reported today. other dummy accounts from elsewhere in canada or around the world don't have the same problem.

i've contacted canada post but they're taking their time getting back to me.

any ideas what to do next?

[p m]

figured out the problem --

the zones table we're using has accents on french, spanish, and germanic letters. there are: "é" , "ö" , "ç", etc.

apparently those characters were conflicting with the canada post database, which was generating the error messages.

i updated the word "Québec" to read "Quebec", refreshed the checkout page (while logged in as a fake quebec customer), and everything worked fine.

i reproduced the error using several other zones with different accents (Galápagos, Oberöesterreich). each time, updating the zones table to get rid of the accent resolved the XML error.

so now i need to go through all 71 pages of the zones table and get rid of the accents...