<p>I have an implementation of default handler. When it gets to a &nbsp; in the character data it stops parsing. Is there any reason that it is doing this? Are there additional properties that I need to set in order for it to deal with &amp;nbsp?</p>

```
&nbsp;
```
is not a valid xml entity. You might try replacing it with
```
&#160;
```
instead, it does the same thing (non-breaking space).