Backup and restore

Dear all:

I tried to search on the forum but didn't find any thread that had intensive discussion about this issue. Here at SFSU within six months we already have three incidences that instructors failed to restore their moodle course, and this was caused by the infamous "square character" in the backup .xml file. This seems to be caused by instructors creating some online text using copy and paste from MS Word (especially Mac version) to Moodle, and this would create the hidden square character which could only be seen if you unzip the backup file and look into the .xml file. We had to manually remove every single square character thingy, zip it back to .zip file and restore it..

Few questions here:

1. We also noticed that using Word for copy and pasting into Moodle would also generate this kind of special characters     . What are these special characters? These  characters seems to be OK with moodle, but not the square characters. Is this caused by character-set, or just an issue of Microsoft Word?
I think the problematic special character that caused restore to break is the "general currency sign" (the square character) - ¤

2. We are currently using Moodle 1.5.4+. Just curious, did Moodle 1.6+ fixed all of these character set issues, including this one?

3. If this is a known issue, how should we inform the instructors to avoid using MS Word for copy and pasting into Moodle to avoid possible future restore problems? What are the tips that we could give to our instructors about avoiding this problem in the future?

Many thanks!