Hotmail replaces / : @ ' ? characters with garbage

When I reply to or forward messages from certain people, Live Hotmail
replaces common non-alphabetic characters, like slashes, colons, question
marks, apostrophes, and parentheses, with their ASCII-HTML encoding. For
example, a ? (question mark) becomes ? (that's ampersand pound six three
semicolon, in case it gets interpreted as HTML here).

I haven't figured out what makes it happen, though I'm guessing it has to do
with the encoding of the message I'm replying to. I think it only happens
when Hotmail remembers that I want to write a plain text reply (it defaults
to the plain/rich text setting of the previous message I wrote). If it
generates a rich text reply and I click "Show plain text" it does not happen.

This is obviously a bug, since nobody wants their characters which are used
all the time in standard written English to turn into numeric nonsense that
only geeks can understand.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Is there a reliable workaround (besides
setting to rich text, going back to the original message, re-clicking reply,
and switching to plain text, which is a huge waste of my time)?

Does Microsoft have an official channel for reporting Hotmail bugs that
actually gets results?

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