Externals links are not working

As you have noticed, this problem does not occur on the local install, so there must be some setting on your server that is causing this. Have you checked URL rewrite rules etc?

On my localhost dev machine running Xampp it works fine, However on the live linux apache server, any url edited with CKEditor ends up like this
http://myservername.co.uk/"http://www.theExternalWebsite/index.php/"
(Even local links are in quotes)

It looks (to me) like the URL is being enclosed in quotes making the server belive it is a local link and not an external one.
This is a new basic website that has no URL rewriting rules applied by me.  
Where would I need to look for these rules and what am I looking for?

Any help greatly received.

Danro

I found the problem .....and the solution

The live server has "magic quotes" turned on in the php.ini.

This I have no access to so my "fix" is to add a function to the top of the affected pages..

the function is....

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    function undoMagicQuotes($array, $topLevel=true) {
        $newArray = array();
        foreach($array as $key => $value) {
            if (!$topLevel) {
                $key = stripslashes($key);
            }
            if (is_array($value)) {
                $newArray[$key] = undoMagicQuotes($value, false);
            }
            else {
                $newArray[$key] = stripslashes($value);
            }
        }
        return $newArray;
    }
    $_GET = undoMagicQuotes($_GET);
    $_POST = undoMagicQuotes($_POST);
    $_COOKIE = undoMagicQuotes($_COOKIE);
    $_REQUEST = undoMagicQuotes($_REQUEST);
}

I hope this heps