I have a legacy Web Forms site in Umbraco 6.0.6 with extensive use of .ascx user controls. There is a development and a live site which are technically identical apart from content.

In both sites TinyMCE is set to not tidy:

Development serves up links as HTML from the external database and Live does not, encoding them:

Dev:

<td>Microsoft patching issue, awaiting a Microsoft update <a href="http://intranet.internal.loc/intranet-features/news/unable-to-open-files-attached-to-outlook-calendar-items.aspx" alt="Outlook Patch">patch</a></td>

Live:

<td>Microsoft patching issue, awaiting a Microsoft update &lt;a href=&quot;http://intranet.internal.loc/intranet-features/news/unable-to-open-files-attached-to-outlook-calendar-items.aspx&quot; alt=&quot;Outlook Patch&quot;&gt;patch&lt;/a&gt;</td>

Database entry live and development (running off identical DBs) is ntext:

Microsoft patching issue, awaiting a Microsoft update <a href="http://intranet.internal.loc/intranet-features/news/unable-to-open-files-attached-to-outlook-calendar-items.aspx" alt="Outlook Patch">patch</a>

The output looks like this in Dev:

And this in Live:

So for some reason there is a quote mark coming through in Dev which means the link html is parsed correctly, but it is absent in Live which means the link is encoded. Whhhhyyyy?

Anyone got any clues what is going on here? I can remake the control but I'd have to add separate columns and controls to the gridviews, change the tables, stored procedures, redeploy 4 separate controls etc. - and all for a bloody link!