Corruption in custom fields when using colon or semi colon

I set my shop up in 1.4.9.4 opencart and due to all items having the need for customisation by customer, have the same option requirements for each item. I bought and use the extension Global Options which allows the one time set up of variable options (drop down text, radio buttons, custom text fields, etc). Once the options have been decided and set up they can be applied to all items, rather than input them all individually. To date I thought it was working all fine but now find that when a customer inputs punctuation such as the colon(:) or semi colon(;) it corrupts the data submitted to checkout and only shows the characters entered before the punctuation was used. Example, if a customer puts 'Born 2:10am on the 24th April 2010', only the text 'Born 2' will appear with all the other charcters being removed. Is this an Opencart problem in general when inputting punctuation in to custom fields OR is it a fault of the Global Options Extension. The developer was very helpful when I purchased the extension but when I raised this problem query they now do not respond.
It might even be a 1.4.9.4 problem that no longer exists in latest opencart so all advice would be greatly appreciated as I need to know how to move forward to give the best customer experience.