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[eluser]darri[/eluser]
I had the same problem with odd characters appearing before anything else on the page (I got ). After a good half hour of tinkering it seems that the problem lies with one or more of the codeigniter files (controller, model or view) being set to UTF8 encoding, while the header's meta tag charset was set to something else (for English it's usually iso-8859-1). The solution for me was to make sure that they were all set to the same type of encoding.

So if your codeigniter files are encoded as UTF8, use a header meta tag like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Or if your codeigniter files are encoded as 8 Bits (I use Flash Develop + this seems to be the default alternative to UTF8), use a header meta tag like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

In the second case there, it might help if you save your codeigniter files as UTF8 and then save them again as 8 Bit, just to refresh the encoding.

Hope that helps you, it worked for me.