(newbie) Collation and encoding in MySQL

I am a newbie to MYSQL and to MyPHPAdmin. I have a wordpress installation on my website that uses version 3.23 of MySQL. I did something I should have done a long time ago, and backed up my database using mysqldump over my ssh connection. I used bzip2 to compress it, and got a nice 1.7 meg compressed file, which apparently PHPMyAdmin understands.

I have PHPMyAdmin on my local machine (a laptop running W7), and it’s giving me various errors reading it back in.

My settings were all default on my copy of MyPHPAdmin:
Collation: “Collation”
MySQL Collection Collation: utf8_general_ci

Then, I import the bzipped database, mydb.bz2
Character set: utf8
SQL Compatability mode: MYSQL323

When I pressed the “GO” button to execute the import, I got the error:
————–8<—SNIP——–8<————–8<—SNIP——–8<
SQL query:

SELECT comment
FROM phpmyadmin.pma_column_info
WHERE db_name = ‘user’
AND table_name = ”
AND column_name = ‘(db_comment)’

MySQL said:
#1100 – Table ‘pma_column_info’ was not locked with LOCK TABLES

————–8<—SNIP——–8<————–8<—SNIP——–8<

First off, I don’t know what this collation thing is about, or how to get the right charset read in, as I have tried others with the same result as I get with the above settings: whatever charset I choose (within sensibility — I run an English-only website), I get fields that show, upon analysis of the tables themselves through the “Structure” tab, several table entries in “latin1_Swedish_ci”. I guarantee I have nothing that needs the Swedish charset on my site. Charsets I played with to see if the result would be different were ascii_bin, ascii_general_ci, binary, and latin1_bin.

When I first installed WordPress on my website, I did not set anything within MySQL, then or since. I let WordPress do all the setting-up, storage and retrieval, setting any pertinent commands through the admin pages, with no trouble.

I may not have used mysqldump correctly. Were there any parameters that I should have passed to it that would have been important?

Only two tables got read in: xyz_comments and xyz_links. There are dozens more. The xyz_comments table contains all the settings for the Swedish charset.

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