[CentOS] Syslog & charset issues

hi, i am running the latest centos 4.1 on a vmware esx server - i'm 
having an issue where all my iptables output is being echoed to the 
vmware primary console, yet my syslog conf is the same as on a rh es4 
server.. anyone run into this before, or know how to shut the console 
logging of iptables off alltogether?

also, i'm seeing "%2C" in some logs instead of spaces, and man pages 
have weird characters as well, and all basic env vars are the same 
between both rh es4 and 4.1, (lang, etc) .. i'm using LANG=en_US.UTF-8 
on both. anyone run into this issue either? (I've also seen it on one 
es3 server before, but it went away with some "up2dates")..

thanks,
jamie