OK ... finally tracked it down (for anyone else having this issue).
It WAS related to what non-printable ascii codes in the title HOWEVER, Authorize.net (or the HS auth.net payment plugin) somehow interprets " - " (i.e. <space><hyphen><space>) as a non-ascii sequence and that is what was blocking the processing.
I'm not sure exactly how this was working before. But after replacing a couple m-dashes with hyphens and then making sure the spaces around all hyphens were removed, it seems to be working properly.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.