If it's any help, it looks like my digital entities (ie alt-089; for a fractional one-half) were converted to HTML entities (ampersand-frac12

only on the descriptions for the items contained on the single admin page I worked on, this is, about 10 items. The other 700+ descriptions were unchanged. This is a relief!
I enabled the colorbox plugin, but can't find any documentation on how to use it on my custom theme. I can't even find any examples. I'm using the Cabel Sasser FancyZoom which is nice because the image will zoom only enough to fit the available window.