Re: unescaped characters
@nickaster: A couple of questions to help out diagnose this.
When you say deactivating does nothing, does that mean that new posts after deactivating still show the slash, or are you referring to old posts? The reason I ask this is that old posts may have stored the slash in the db, in which case the plugins may not affect this. Try deactivating the plugins and creating a new post to see if the slash is still there / appears in the new post.
What version of bbPress are you using?
Are there any other plugins you are using, or only those 3?
Are your plugins up to date?