I didn't change anything from the default options for the RSS feed. After I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the ? and * originally, I tried changing to utf-8 for the character set, which is still what I have it set to. I'll try the blank character stripper trick you mentioned. Maybe I can figure something else out.
Thanks for giving me a hand with this kh99! I might not find a solution to this anytime soon, but I can't thank you enough for helping me try to find one