Problems with ' even after escaping it

I'm currently using ' and " to escape single and double quote marks. This works through one iteration of edit-save, but not the second. When a user enters the ' mark themselves it saves in my database just fine, and retrieves and shows up in the editor just fine. But then when I press save without changing the contents of the editor, the editor code returns "Jenny's Test" as "Jennys Test" with a hidden character in there, which turns into a ? after it goes through my database.

What hidden character is being used, or how do I find out? Why is it trying to escape my apostrophe itself instead of letting me do it? Presumably when it's being sent in an HTTP POST back to a server cgi or servlet, it doesn't need encoding.

Also, why is it only changing the quote mark when I haven't typed into the editor? That's very strange.

Thanks.

Jenny