With the update to Magento 1.4.0.1 I discovered that any Product Name that contained an ampersand character, like “Loaves & Fishes” was not being displayed properly. Instead of the ampersand character showing, the entity was showing instead, "&"
. Curiously, the ampersand was being displayed in other areas correctly, such as the breadcrumb.
This caused me to investigate. I discovered that a number of other people were experiencing similar issues with ampersands not displaying. I filed a bug report with Magento and a couple days later I received a response. It seems that this is a behavior that actually has a toggle.
If you are experiencing this yourself, go to Catalog>Attributes>Manage Attributes, then click the “name” attribute code in the first column to open the properties window. Scroll down in the window until you see “Allow HTML-tags on Front-end” and be sure to set the value to “Yes.” Save your changes and then check your store. This should fix the problem and you should now see “&” instead of “&” in the Product Name.