Form helper displays unicode characters as &#xxx;

[eluser]earthdog[/eluser]
Hi All!

My problem is shown on the first screenshot.

A view containing the same form in 2 ways: using form helper and using standard html tags.

The issue is that i dont get the unicode (greek) characters shown up.Instead i am getting them in the format &#xxx;..

My CI config files are configured for utf8
HTML response headers indicate uf8
My Db/tables/fields are all utf8

What am i missing guys?

Thanks.