I got it figured out. Its in the easypopulate2.php in the admin folder the values were divided by 3
Did you install zencart 1.5 with iso-8859 or utf8?
UTF8 is multibyte... and you need to divide by 3 to get character count. However, if your store is set UTF8 and your databases are iso-8859 it may be confusing the script.