PeopleSoft BI Publisher Error- Invalid UTF8 encoding

Hello,

I'm trying to create a custom BI Publisher report in PeopleSoft that uses an Excel template.  When I generate a preview of the report in Excel using the BI Publisher add-in it works fine, but when I attempt to run or preview it from PeopleSoft I get the following error:

"java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid UTF8 encoding"

I've run the XML through validators and I can't find any issues with the XML formatting or characters.  The app engine that generates the XML is using a PeopleCode XmlDoc object, which I thought would ensure that the output is UTF-8.

The template was saved as Excel 97-2003 (.xls), as instructed.  I'm attaching a sample XML file.  I noticed that if I try to use the XML with an RTF template instead of XLS then it seems to work.