Viewfield+CCK : Not parsing arguments properly

I'm cross posting as I originally had this in the module dev forum but wasn't getting any bites. I've installed CCK and views and everything works great. I wanted to try viewfield, but none of my nodes are displaying anything.

I created a debug view that spits out a small table of node titles (limited to 4) and uses the argument handler to put debug info into the footer. I found that viewfield isn't properly handling the view at all. For instance, when I go to the URL of the debug view on its own, I get the small table followed by my arguments.

When I go to the URL of the node that has the viewfield, instead of following my view's rule of a small table, it wants to show the whole table of node titles (not limited to 4), and also the debug footer shows that the argument passing into it isn't being delimited properly.

What's supposed to happen is that the argument in the viewfield is comma separated, but all of my arguments are being passed in one character at a time. Meaning that instead of "test" as a single argument (which it successfully parses in its own dedicated view URL), in my viewfield node it gets passed into the view as four arguments t, e, s, and t.

This also happens with the built-in arguments of viewfield. If I enter an argument of %author, my debug code shows that the args passed in were %, a, u, t, h, o, and r.

As a sanity check, I entered an argument of *test. This ended up showing something since I have * as a wildcard in my view. But the debug code is still showing that while * was an appropriate value for $args[0], the rest of the letters are being passed each as their own argument.

I started playing around and started entering commas, and likewise those got treated as a character. I started getting suspicious when I went into the viewfield hook for argument handling and forced the arguments to return as 'foo' and 'bar', but was still getting the same individual letters as arguments. It seems that some other function is stepping on the hook and not allowing me to properly run, because the explode PHP call isn't being run at all. Any ideas where this rogue hook function might be hiding?