Text formatting

I’ve set PerferRichText to 0 and restarted the service. I put in a reply via the web form, deleting the text inserted by the system so the box was blank and the system recorded this in addition to my text:

??? ???X? ??Scrips and
Recipients ???This message will be sent to.
…??(Check boxes to disable notifications to
the listed recip
ients)???On Correspond Notify Other Recipients???On Cor
res
pon
d Notify Othe
r R
ecipients with template Correspondence ???On Correspond Notif
y Requestors and Ccs???On Correspond Notif
y Requestors and Ccs with template Cor

Can anyone help? I’m running 3.8.0 on CentOS 5.2 with a MySQL 5 db.