I don't know anyway around how to escape/preserve the special characters in XML, since they indeed are SPECIAL

like &, , etc...

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/31/qanda.html

Someone asked this question on StackOverflow (Google)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/270948/how-to-preserve-an-ampersand-while-using-for-xml-path-on-sql-2005