Forms: Quoted input confusion

Before i'm getting mad, i'd like to post this. I'm sure anybody has experienced and solved this problem : I have two forms in a document called "form_test.php3". There is a textarea, waiting for inputs. Pressing submit will result in processing the input in this page somehow. I have provided "echo stripslashes($text)" here to avoid confusion, if someone has entered quotes or a backslash (magic_quotes is turned ON) This works great, the page is being reloaded (why?), and the input doesn't get lost. <FORM NAME="main" ACTION="form_test.php3" METHOD="post"> <TEXTAREA NAME="text"><? echo stripslashes($text)?></TEXTAREA> <INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="send" VALUE="send"> </FORM> <BR><BR> <FORM NAME="update" ACTION="recieve.php3" METHOD="post"> <INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="text" VALUE="<? echo ($text); ?>"> <INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="update" VALUE="update"> </FORM> The second form is to deliver the input of the first form to another page. This works also fine with clean text inputs. The Problem: The second form delivers only \\ after user has entered "wow" ?? can u help ? thanks in advance jyrgen