hiya
i'll alert @Jack Kitterhing to this for you, hopefully he'll respond soon.
magic_quotes is a PHP function which escapes characters when storing/retrieving data from the DB.
it's a nasty function as most script developers do this themselves, so on a server with magic quotes enabled, it will add multiple slashes.
magic_quotes is deprecated in current versions of PHP and in latest versions of PHP its disabled compketely and will be removed eventually so all this crap shouldn't then happen.
if you have access to your php.ini, you should turn magic_quotes_gpc off.
hopefully that helps you understand it a bit more.