Having moved to Joomla 3 I have discovered the joy of php magic quotes killing links in articles. Despite this being a shared server, the way to switch them off is simple. Create a file called php.ini and save a copy of it to the root folder (i.e. where you have the Joomla index.php file) and also in the administrator folder. The file should have these contents:
magic_quotes_gpc = Off magic_quotes_runtime = Off magic_quotes_sybase = Off extension=pdo.so extension=pdo_mysql.so
Thanks to Stack Overflow for this