kind of, but its more of workaround. I juts go through the xml and replace every & with an &amp before I pass it on to XMLin.
Something like:

my @xml = <FILE>; # slurp ..
close(FILE);
foreach( @xml){
  # Ugly hack to keep XML::Simple(?) from double encoding certain stri
+ngs, 
  # see: perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=660162 and perlmonks.org/index
+.pl?node_id=215678
   s/&/&amp;/g;
}
[download]

I _think_ number entities like &x### are legal in xml and should be either left untouched or maybe "converted" into the utf8 char?
anyone?