>Can anyone here help or at least supply a reason for this inconsistent
>treatment?

Your subscriber is using characters which are either accented, or are not
ordinary type-writer punctuation characters.  Such characters will often
come through looking like =AB or =FF instead of the character which
appears to them.  One of the largest causes of this is people who use what
are called "smart quotes".  Such characters are the kind you see which
makes a left quote different from a right quote on many word processor
documents, and can be sent similarly to a list.  However, they appear as
pretty much nonsensical to anybody else.

Another instance of this is when characters with accents come through
LISTSERV.  Since such characters are dependant entirely upon your
operating system, and the corresponding ASCII, EBCDIC, or other character
definition schemes, they will very likely not look the same on all
computers that you send the character to.

The only way to solve these problems is to ask your subscriber to not
include any of these funny characters.

Glenn