The only other thing that I could find that might shed some
light on why the decrypt function might fail is this:
http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/releasenotes/mx/knownissues_mx_j2ee_p2.html
One known issue was this:
The Encrypt and Decrypt functions do not work with
double-byte character sets. If you pass a string containing
double-byte characters to the Encrypt function, and later pass the
encrypted value to the Decrypt function, the string is not properly
decrypted.
But, that list of known issues is dated December 2002, and I
imagine that this issue is probably fixed by now.