Suggestion:

Any meta-refresh tag with an amp (&) in the URL should still be rendered as & to be XHTML Transitional compliant.

For example:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=http://siteurl/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2&p=2#p2" />

...can still be rendered with & instead of just & and work fine. Otherwise, when validated, it throws XHTML compliance errors.

Tested with FF 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0, Opera 8-9, NS 7.2 and 8.1.2 IE 5.0-7.0, Lynx, Links and the latest Konqueror. Do not have access to Safari at the moment.

As far as I know, meta tags are still considered literal elements, and thus following the XHTML 1.0 standards for both strict and transitional, & must be used in place of &.

If I am off base here, let me know, as it would save me a few keystrokes in webdev as well. I had noticed

    // Make sure no &'s are in, this will break the redirect

    $url = str_replace('&', '&', $url);

in functions.php under the function redirect. What browsers does it break in?