Welcome to the forums erawlins
I am not good as a PHP programmer. But I guess the second slash is added by magiciquotes_gpc while reading back from the cookie file. FYI, gpc stands for get, post, cookie that's it works when any or all of the above methods is called. You can turn off magic quotes by using php_flag in .htaccess. Feel free to ping support if you need assistance in turnig it off for your account.