Blank product descriptions when editing in Admin

[abcschooldr]

Version 1.3.9h. Php 5.3 Siteground is my host. Within the last few months, my product descriptions (I have 2) are blank on the admin side. The product descriptions are still found on the consumer side - unless I type in the admin product description box. When I added a product description in the product description 1 box, the product description also disappeared from the consumer side.
I have read the documentation. The ideal is a fix, but until I find one; is there a way to change it within a file, to just fix a few products? And, is there a fix? It sounded like Php, but mine is set at 5.3

[DrByte]

Those symptoms are typical of the case where you've got your site character-set set to iso-8859-1 and your database content is set to utf-8, or vice-versa.
Often, when english.php has CHARSET defined to iso-8859-1 but the actual data has utf8 characters, the admin editor chokes when trying to display the data.
That's why, back in 2011, Zen Cart released v1.5.0 which defaulted to using utf8 everywhere, and since then a plugin tool has been created to help convert the data too.

Why are you still running 1.3.9?

There "could" be other causes of the symptoms you're reporting. But the one I describe is the most common one.

[abcschooldr]

Thank you Sensei! I think that was the problem. I delayed an upgrade because I thought it would be challenging with modifications. It seems like it is time to be brave.