3.0 upgrade messed up references to filenames that contain accented chars.

after upgrading from 2.8.x (maybe it was 2.9.x) to 3.1.2, all the references inside posts to filenames (usually images) which contain accented got changed.

before, filenames that are displayed in the filesystem like “EXPRESSÃO.jpg” would be correctly called out in the post content HTML as “EXPRESSÃO.jpg”. WP 3.x decided to convert those references to “EXPRESSÃO.jpg” (which is what the filename looked like when created/uploaded by the blog author), so now all the images that have such chars are broken links.

i was able to, with the help of a perl script via SSH, obtain a list of all the files that have special chars.

whats the quickest way to solve this problem?

if I knew which table the conversion Ã->Ã is based upon I could convert filenames in one of the two places:

A) i could rename the files to use the correct spelling (EXPRESSÃO.jpg -> EXPRESSÃO.jpg)

B) i could batch update wp-posts in phpmyadmin to start using all those weird chars (EXPRESSÃO.jpg -> EXPRESSÃO.jpg)

does anyone have any other suggestions? ONLY filenames are mangled. All other accented text works fine.

wp-config shows (yes i already tried to comment them out)
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ”);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

mySQL shows:
DB Collation in effect: latin1_swedish_ci
default DB Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
Tables Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
Columns Collation: latin1_swedish_ci

PLEASE help!