special character problem - otion values

[billharris]

I am having a problem with the display of special characters (non-ASCII) in my Zencart pages, but only in the names of product option values.

The special characters are entered in the database as numeric character references.

The special characters display correctly in the products page. However, in the shopping cart contents and the confirmation page, the names of product options values do not display correctly. Note, however, that the names of product options do display correctly with the same characters.

Example: the word ĝis is displayed incorrectly as & #285;is.

OS: Windows XP
Zencart 1.3.8
Language: English
english.php contains the line define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');
database charset is utf-8
database connection collation is utf-unicode-ci
the collation value for product options and product options values is utf-unicode-ci

I would appreciate any help with this problem.
I apologize in advance if this post is in the wrong place.

Thank you.