Everything seems to be fine except for when a track starts playing then the song title gets mangled (drops every other character...produces some strange looking titles!). Folder titles are displayed correctly. The song title is displayed correctly before the song actually starts to play.

No such issue with iTunes-produced MP3s so I'm guessing some sort of tag incompatibility?

Anyone else use Linux/Rhythmbox to create MP3s for their SD cards?

Before the song plays what's displayed is the file name, once the song starts playing that's replaced with the track name in the ID3 tag.

So it sounds like you have 16-bit character codes (i.e. non-ASCII) characters in the ID3 tags.