Janine,
It looks like the byte sequence is the complaint, meaning that the characters just before and just after don't make sense. It's probably not the case for all 0x8e cases.
Sometimes inputs, such as registration data, are broken, either purposefully or just some kind of encoding conversion issue etc.
Regardless, look at the dump data surrounding the complaint to identify the cause. It may be a unique combination in the db. A guess substitution may be close enough to keep your task from being delayed much further.
cheers,
Torben
