[eluser]TheFuzzy0ne[/eluser]
The form helper should only escape HTML values when you use set_value, and it definitely only escapes them once.
What does the page source look like? &#xxx; or &#xxx;?
What browser are you using?
Are you outputting a header that sets encoding? If so, where, and what does it look like? If not, try putting this at the top of your view (before the doctype):
Code:
<?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>