I'm not sure what order this will show up in since my first post is still not showing but I reached out to the mc2xml dev and he was already aware of the problem. Here is his response:
"Yes, I am sorry about that. MS suddenly started adding ampersands
to make their program icons smaller, and that is the one field that
wasn't encoding ampersands. Some PVR software has trouble
importing the xmltv.xml file with those characters. (I wrote a note
about this on the homepage)"
Here is the note from the homepage:
http://mc2xml.awardspace.info/
"2015-08-11: MS has added ampersands to the program images. Send an email if your PVR software has any problems importing the xmltv file (due to the icon tag with unencoded &) and I will reply with an update that encodes/fixes it (a quick fix if your PVR doesn't use images: sed "/<icon/d" xmltv.xml > xmltv.out )"
I'm an mc2xml supporter and was provided an updated exe that properly encodes the &. Super quick response and resolution from the dev. If you use mc2xml its totally worth supporting.