There's a small bug fix out for the 3.9 release of BottomFeeder available. As it happens, the http code was making an incorrect assumption about getting encoding information from XML documents. It was assuming that every header with encoding information would wrap the encoding in double quotes (as HTTP attributes normally are). A quick perusal of the specs shows that this is a bad assumption - the encoding can be wrapped in single quotes. The latest update for the NetResources library addresses this. The symptom? There are some feeds that weren't being read at all, and others that were being badly decoded (i.e., you would see occasional odd characters).