I had the same problem, but on the Payments screen. When I had just PayPal enabled, there was no problem. When I enabled Cash On Delivery as well, two things were wrong -
- it displayed the 'bad characters' on the screen just above 'Please select the preferred payment method to use on this order'. These are the same characters that are described in the original question here for Information pages
- instead of listing the description 'Cash On Delivery', it listed 'text_title'.
The root cause turned out that the file
catalog/language/english/payment/cod.php was corrupt.
It did not appear to be corrupt initially - it behaved perfectly in my test environment and only showed up as a problem on my live environment.
When I edited this
cod.php file on the live server, it looked fine. However if I viewed it instead, it displayed corrupt characters. Uploading the file again from my test environment did not resolve the problem. Instead, on the live server, I copied
pp_standard.php to
cod.php, edited it, and typed in the correct cod.php code.