Ok, so I know I'm being somewhat anally-retentive about this but anyway....

I have a site that has an external link that looks like this...

<a href="http://www.spss.com/predictive_text_analytics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">

Because of that damn URL, I know have validation errors and warnngs on that page, namely...

Line 144, Column 81: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "hpzone".
…_analytics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analyt

Line 144, Column 81: general entity "hpzone" not defined and no default entity.
…_analytics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analyt

Line 144, Column 87: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter.
…tics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analytics</a

Line 144, Column 87: reference to external entity in attribute value.
…tics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analytics</a

Line 144, Column 87: reference to entity "hpzone" for which no system identifier could be generated.
…tics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analytics</a

Line 144, Column 80: entity was defined here.
…t_analytics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analy Line

144, Column > 80: XML Parsing Error: EntityRef: expecting ';'.
…t_analytics/index.htm?source=homepage&hpzone=tech">SPSS Predictive Text Analy…

So basically I'm wondering if there is any work around...or is this a lost cause?

change the ampersand (&) after ?source=homepage to "&amp;" (without the quotes)

Thanks Steven

I didn't know you could do that without breaking the URL.

Yep, it translates the character entity before it resolves the url