I have an outstanding problem with a particular web service, where it's complaining that I'm sending invalid unicode characters. Since Sylvia is under the weather (thus no office lunch) I took my copy of XML in a Nutshell down to the Greek place for lunch. Sure enough, right as I was finishing my gyro, I came across this:

The encoding declaration tells the parser in which character set the document is written. It's used only when other metadata from outside the file is not available.

Emphasis mine. Basically, since i send my XML as an attachment to a SOAP request (i didn't write the API, I just implement it) I probably just need to check the mime type I'm setting for the attachment.

Wish me Luck.