Did a quick test on my testblog and for me it works without having to exclude anything really (I changed the "Sidebar Selector" to match my theme's sidebar id and "Wait Milliseconds Before Activation, after page has loaded" to 500ms, but that's just because I'm impatient).
But it just works for me, so there's probably another javascript that has problems being aggregated. In that case you could either check your console to see what might be wrong, or you could try with "Add try-catch wrapping?" activated in Autoptimize.
Regarding the strange characters; I'll have a look.