I tried that. I removed all the code except for the part that calls Serial.available() and Serial.read()
I am transmitting a variation of the data back to my laptop as well to confirm successful transmission.
Is it possible there's a bug with two-way transmissions causing corruption? I noticed that the serial code (uart.c) in Wiring-013 is somewhat different from the code in Arduino-009 and -010 (wiring_serial.c)