if you have the GNU text utilities most of them have a '-0' type option to seperate filenames with nulls.

find . -type d -depth -print0 | xargs -0 prog
[download]

which helps alot with the funky character problem. also there's the '-exec' option to find.

find . -type d -depth -exec rmdir -- {} \;
[download]

which (i think) bypasses the shell so funky characters are no problem. the '--' option is handy to turn off further argument processing so a directory like '-r' isn't taken as a flag.