FW: Strange problem with data corruption

I am using RLib as a php extension on a linux system.  I am connecting to an
mssql datasource via odbc with the freetds odbc driver.  All driver and
package versions are latest stable.  When I execute this script, my data is
corrupted (funky chars, etc.), but differs each time.  This leads me to
believe maybe I am using RLib wrong and it is trying to display some
resultset identifier or something else non-readable.  Attached are my php
script and my xml.  Am I doing everything right?  If so, is there a charset
option I can specify somewhere, or some other option I can adjust to
diagnose this corrupt data problem?  Thanks for the help RLibers.