Blogger's Unencoded Ampersands

I've gone back to the template version that, thanks to the coders at Blogger, no longer validates.
The changes that I made to the template yesterday got rid of the unencoded ampersands but screwed up the comments.
Any comment entered, appeared on all the posts because the posts all ended up with the same postid and I haven't a clue how to get round that.
I tried to reinstall the Haloscan code using their automatic installer but my Blogger dashboard doesn't have the required 'save the original template button'. I suspect that was only on the beta version of New Blogger.
I can save the template manually but Haloscan doesn't work on a template that doesn't have 'official Blogger' save codes in it.
As a result of all this I am totally fed up.
To make matters worse the rain is lashing down outside so I'm stuck indoors.
Luckily I have just remembered that I have bread dough on the go so I'll have to go and sort that out.

If anyone can suggest a way to sort this mess I'd be eternally grateful.

Why Blogger decided to publish two identical versions of this post baffles me. Yes I have deleted the extra post, I'm not totally crazy.