Rich Text Editor - Saving encoded characters

Hi all,

I am using CQ5.5 SP2.1. The problem faced is that on IE8 Western European (Windows) encoding, special characters do not display correctly. However, using HTML encoded version of the special character will display correctly, i.e. using £ instead of £.

However, on the richtext editor in source edit, the £ gets converted to £ upon save, and is saved and rendered as £ instead of £. Is there a way to remove the conversion upon save?

Thanks!