$.ajax() problem in IE, but not in Firefox and Chrome... encoding issue?

$.ajax() problem in IE, but not in Firefox and Chrome... encoding issue?

I'm using $.ajax() on a webpage to fetch a XML result from a classic ASP page.

This works fine in all browsers as long as there are no special characters like the Euro sign in the XML result.
Once there is such a character in the XML result, Internet Explorer reports: "DOM exception: syntax error (12)". But other browsers like Firefox and Chrome don't have this problem. They process the XML result just fine.



I guess this must be an encoding issue or something like that. But I don't understand why the other browsers are not reporting that same issue.



My (shortened) jQuery call is like this:
  1. function wsGetTemplateDetails() {
        //
        var l_oTemplates = $('#numTemplateID').get(0);
        var l_iID = l_oTemplates[l_oTemplates.selectedIndex].value;
        var l_sURL = '/wsadmin/ajax_emailtemplates.asp';
        $('body').css('cursor', "progress");
        $.ajax({
                type: "get",
                url: l_sURL,
                data: "action=getemailtemplatedetails&id=" + l_iID,
                dataType: "xml",
                error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown){
                    alert('Error loading XML document: ' + errorThrown);
                },
            success: function(xmlData){
            var l_oNode;
           
            try {
                var l_oMessage = $('#memMessage').get(0);
                        if (l_oMessage) {
                            l_oNode = $(xmlData).find('Html');
                if (l_oNode && l_oNode.text().length > 0) {
                    $('#memMessage').val(l_oNode.text());
                }
                }
                    }
                    catch(err) {
                        //Handle errors here
                    }
                   
                    $('body').css('cursor', '');
                }
        });
            $('body').css('cursor', '');
    }



































The classic ASP which is triggered by the $.ajax() call has 'Response.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8;" ' and is using MSXML2.DOMDocument.6.0 to build the XML document.