need help withXMLHTTPreq and parsing response

Hi, it's my first post here.

I'm grabbing a byte stream with XMLHTTPRequest.  Normally, the stream is
processed in a java applet as a byte stream.  Most of the data comes in as
expected, but an occassional character seems to be garbled.  For example,
looking at the stream contents in Venkmann, I can see something like this:
SE\x07\x03\u8220\x67
All the characters are recognized normally, but the Unicode one.  In this
case the \u8220 should be (int)147.  I guess what I'm looking for is some
insight as to how the data is parsed by the XMLHTTPRequest object and how I
may convert the misrecognized characters to what they're supposed to be.
I've tried overriding the MIME type to x-application/octet-stream and
everything else I can think of, but it's always the same.
Any ideas?  THanks in advance,

--Jason