I am still fruitlessly trying to track down the source of the xml parsing error. I am not sure if this is related or not, but in the rss.css and rss.xls files are the following wording:

The CSS/XLS files are sent to the browser in this order: (and alphabetically within each case of more than one match):

rss*.css // are always loaded and at least ONE should contain site-wide properties.
rss*.xls // are always loaded and at least ONE should contain site-wide properties.

Do I need to input something here to make it work, and if so, what? I am not sure what site-wide properties would be appropriate for an rss feed.

Please help.