odd question about character conversion

hello all - this is a strange situation therefore i am asking a strange question.

we are displaying phonetic symbols on a webpage (or at least trying to).

one of the symbols looks like the capital letter "O" with a line going through it. using html special characters, it can be shown with an ampersand-pound-240-semicolon: ø

optionally, we have been using a hex value of F8 to display it.

ever since i started using virtualmin, displaying phonetic symbols using the hex-value no longer seems to work.

any ideas why this might be? is there something in virtualmin that might be suppressing certain (but not all) hex characters?

(you were warned this was a strange question)

a possible solution might be some command like this:

find /home/ -name '*.html' -exec sed -i -e 's?\xF8?ø?g;' {} \;