Okay, we've come across a solution.
The problem is when the editable field of the column is set to true, the *value* of the cell changes to html, because it's now editable.
ie wheras before you might have had column “Age”:”16″,
when it is being edited, the value “16” changes to , and this is what is pulled out by getRowData(…).
if you're not sure what i mean, switch the column property editable:true -> editable:false and then call getRowData(…) you'll see the actual value pop up.
this frustrated me for about 3 hours this afternoon, someone only just pointed out to me what was up 😀
from here i'm going to try to figure out how to use jquery/jqgrid to change the editable property of the field to false before i call getRowData