/ in new link cannot be rendered

The / character as a the first character of a new freelinking term cannot be processed by freelinking. An example of such a term is "/etc". Instead of the term not being processed as a possible freelinking link, the section of the content (in my case node->body) is not displayed at all.

I understand that to allow '/' as the first character produces a security risk, or a 404 page not found error if clean urls are used, but there should be a better way to handle such characters.

Possible solutions include rewriting the code to change these symbols to HTML character sequences such as / becomes / (better), or just not process such terms as possible new freelinking pages.