haha yah sometimes weird things do happen. Like I was struggling with setting the charset to utf-8 on bitnami / dreamfactory / apache but it simply doesn't work. Have tried all possible things including almost every solution on SO but no luck....hahaha, sometimes silly problems can keep one awake for the whole night 
Hope you get lucky with the response decoding thingy, the right way. I am not a big fan of hacks too. It's short term fun and sometimes long term misery 
Cheers,
M&M