XMLRPC - Root element missing

I have made some progress. It seems that the encoding of the request is sent in us-ascii and thus the client gets a response fault code 104 malformed. I assume this is because the encoding is not utf-8, though why said response comes back in utf-16 is a bit weird itself. Checking the library I found references to utf-8 so the ci library must be expecting or accepting only utf-8 perhaps? I cannot actually change the encoding on the client, so is there a way to accept us-ascii or does this hint at another issue?