path / pathauto module permission issues (with services module calls)

having a very strange issue, 1 variable in the data is 'null' when called from windows, and has the proper value on mac
I thought this was not possible, but it happened somehow...
all the other data is totally correct, except the 'path' variable (called thru the ViewsService)
I traced it further in the services_node_load and isolated that one variable where it filters the nodes, when I do a strlen() on the $node->{$field} there, on mac it returns the proper length, but on windows it is always 0, so as if the data is not there :/

the only difference I see is (with charles) that windows does not add the 'Accept-Charset' in the header as on mac, could this be the issue? anyone any clues, or pointers for this??

(I tried all combinations of $gateway->setCharsetHandler("iconv", "UTF-8", "UTF-8"); already, but w/o success, the string it should return is a simple path generated from pathauto eg. 'lang/product/sub-category')