Money values entered with currency symbol should be considered valid

At my organization I have received several phone calls from frustrated donors telling me that our website will not accept their donation because they have entered an invalid amount. This error happens when donors choose "other amount" and enter a value prefixed by a dollar sign.

As discussed in this forum thread,
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,27285.msg138769.html#msg138769
Civi should accept values entered with a dollar sign.

I gather that for each donor who took the time to actually call us, there were others who just gave up. I'm confident we're losing valuable donations due to this bug.