Character Encoding

I want to share a recent upgrade experience that may help others save some time:

I upgraded a client's MT installation from 4.1 to 4.3.2 and had significant character encoding issues. The mySQL data base on the server was defaulted to latin1_general_ci encoding when MT 4.1 was installed in late 2007. Everything worked just fine. All the special characters showed up fine in the MT UI and published entries.

After upgrading to MT 4.3.2 special characters were not being converted correctly and displayed inappropriately in the MT UI and published entries. BTW, we are publishing with a standard en-us default location. After much research in MT forums and MT documentation without much help I resorted to MT support for a solution. Here's what we discovered:

1. MT 4.3.2 requires PERL 5.8.1 or later. My server was still supporting PERL 5.6.1.
2. The mt-config.cgi file required a SQLSetNames parameter to be set to "1".

After upgrading the server PERL software (to PERL 5.8.8) and setting the config file parameter, life is wonderful!!

I hope this helps someone out there pulling their hair(s) out with a similar problem.