Disabling wptexturize & symbol replacement

Hi,
I have a weird problem where I’m trying to pass GET variables in a redirect URL – e.g. mywebsite.com?name=fred&age=35&location=london – but for some reason the & symbols are replaced by &#038; in the URL – which of course doesn’t work.

I can fix this by commenting out the following line (85) from the formatting.php file:
$curl = preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-zA-Z1-4]{1,8};)/', '&#038;$1', $curl);

But – my question is – what else does this line/wptexturize affect? Is this going to muck up my use of & symbols across the whole site?

Thanks in advance!
Jon

Sorry for the weird code formatting by the way, but if I write &#038; in one line it turns into an &!