Strange characters but encoding seems to match

Hi All

Praying someone can help me solve this: I’m experiencing the symptoms of a character set and collation mismatch between the wpconfig file and the database (ie lots of ””’ and ???? characters appearing when posts and pages are saved, and even in the basic structure such as the blog title), but I can’t find the mismatch anywhere.

My wp-config is set:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’)
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”)

My server is running MySQL 5.0.45 and phpMyAdmin 2.8.2.4 and the MySQL charset and connection collation is set to utf8_general_ci

Inside the structure, all the individual fields that are set with a language are also set collation utf8_general_ci

I’ve tried many things including changing the wp-config and database to latin1_swedish_ci but nothing seems to make a difference.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there something else that could be fundamentally wrong?

An example of what’s happening:
http://www.lifedreaming.me/?p=11

best wishes
Marc