i found a sotution to the problem, it's to do with the browser and the server encoding files. my web pages default to iso-8859-1 and i believe my server was defaulted to UTF-8, dropping the pound sign on post backs - i believe the same would happen to the euro sign.
apologies for accusing your editor, but it was the only thing on the page, and this problem has passed unnoticed until now!
noticed that his events had no pound signs in them. Upon further investigation I had determined that the £ sign would not be present in the form data posted back from the client. The solution for this is to change the request/response ending for the form or, more appropriately, for the whole site by changing the web.config file as follows
<system.web>
...
<globalization
fileEncoding="iso-8859-1"
requestEncoding="iso-8859-1"
responseEncoding="iso-8859-1"
/>
...
</system.web>
http://www.howtodothings.com/computers/a832-aspnet-losing-your-pound-sign.html