Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

I am using FOP to convert xml to PDF.
It works well except:
1) If the xml file I am converting contains an & I get the following error message:
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.
at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.reportError(XMLParser.java, Compiled Code)

Is there any way to escape the & so that it gets through to the final PDF?

2) When the servlet request is from IE (5.5) I get a subsequent servlet request issued automatically by the browser, sometimes this overwrites the URL information so I am having to cache my report objects on the session to get around this. Netscape does not do this. Does anyone know of a better solution to this problem?

I would be grateful for a solution to these.