1.7.6 ran without errors, other than the ones I'm used to, so it pulled in the entries. That's good.

What it seems to have exchanged in return is to render those glyphs with diacritical marks in mojibake instead of their correct glyphs, and it may or may not be rendering HTML escape codes correctly or well, but it is definitely not erroring out on those posts that it was erroring before. The solution you implemented is at least functional.