Aggregator Module broken under PHP 5.2.8 -- HTML entities are ignored

I think I have identified where the stripping is occurring, but I don't know how to stop it. Line 915 of aggregator.modules.inc is:

function aggregator_filter_xss($value) {

	return filter_xss($value, preg_split('/\s+|<|>/', variable_get('aggregator_allowed_html_tags', '<a> <b> <br> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <i> <li> <ol> <p> <strong> <u> <ul>'), -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY)); 
}

I'm kind of confused by this function. It seems that the allowed_html_tags are hardcoded into this function rather than being taken from the Aggregator settings, but in either case I have modified the allowed tags in both this file and the aggregator functions to no avail.

Here is a sample of the output:

table border=0 width= valign=top cellpadding=2 cellspacing=7trtd valign=top class=jfont style=font-size:85%;font-family:arial,sans-serifbrdiv style=padding-top:0.8em;img alt= height=1 width=1/divdiv class=lha href=http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=Tct=us/7-0fd=Rurl=http://www.mlive.com/businessreview/oakland/index.ssf/2008/12/clean_energy_activist_t_boone.htmlcid=1280628287ei=JpBGSeaBMIaqNr-1xYYPusg=AFQjCNGzQffrI8CAznmDXVieFa2u_sg0qg• Clean energy activist T. Boone Pickens to higlight 2009 Mackinac b.../b/abrfont size=-1font color=#6f6f6fMLive.com,nbsp;MInbsp;-/font nobr1 hour ago/nobr/fontbrfont size=-1His speech on the island will include a moderated discussion about how Michigan can become a leader in the balternative energy/b industry. b.../b/font/div/font/td/tr/table 

It seems obvious that the problem is that all of the < and > tags are being removed and thus this is not valid HTML and therefore displayed as-is.

That's about the extent of my skills, though. I can't find out where in the code this error is being produced.

Does anyone have any pointers for me?

Thanks

Jon

After much mucking about. I have positively identified line 717 as the cuplrit:

717:  if (!xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, 1)) {
718:    watchdog('aggregator', 'The feed from %site seems to be broken, due to an error "%error" on line %line.', array('%site' => $feed['title'], '%error' => xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)), '%line' => xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)), WATCHDOG_WARNING);
719:    drupal_set_message(t('The feed from %site seems to be broken, because of error "%error" on line %line.', array('%site' => $feed['title'], '%error' => xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)), '%line' => xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser))), 'error');
720:    return 0;
721:  }
722:  xml_parser_free($xml_parser);

When the global $items array is populated by the call to xml_parse, the < and > tags are stripped out of it.

However, since xml_parse seems to be an internal PHP class, I don't have a clue what to do about this issue.

Any help?

Jon