[checkout 0.1.18 & checkout email 0.0.10] Character before currency symbols in email

I've seen this mentioned on the forum before but couldn't track it down - apologies for the duplication. In the email generated when an order is submitted, I've started getting an additional  character appear before every instance where the currency symbol (£) appears.

It's only just started happening and can't figure out why. Also, why do thumbnails appear for some photos and not for others in the emails?

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Gallery version = 2.2.3 core 1.2.0.5
PHP version = 4.4.7 cgi
Webserver = Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)
Database = mysqlt 5.0.45-log, lock.system=flock
Toolkits = ArchiveUpload, Exif, Getid3, LinkItemToolkit, NetPBM, Thumbnail, Gd, jpegtran, SquareThumb
Acceleration = none, none
Operating system = Linux infong 2.4 #1 SMP Thu Jan 13 08:59:31 CET 2005 i686 unknown
Default theme = matrix
gettext = enabled
Locale = en_GB
Browser = Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.12
Rows in GalleryAccessMap table = 79
Rows in GalleryAccessSubscriberMap table = 303
Rows in GalleryUser table = 12
Rows in GalleryItem table = 300
Rows in GalleryAlbumItem table = 17
Rows in GalleryCacheMap table = 0