First I’ve heard of that particular issue.
One thing to check is with your webhost and to make sure (if you’re on shared) they will support you turning this on.
I’m having this exact same issue however I have not tried to disable multisite as I noticed after having setup three other blogs. The other blogs are all converts from normal wordpress blogs and have no issues such as this.
What’s your database character set?
I had researched more after my post – this is related to my site existing in the pre-2.1.3 days when latin1_swedish_ci was the default on the db. new sites are shown as utf8_general_ci.
I’ve ready up and have seen that I can perform a lot of sql (which I’ve got no issue doing) to convert the latin1 tables to utf8 or just take a dump, edit the dump, drop tables, then re-import to fix. Seems like that would be easier/quicker but are there any downsides?
It looks like the root issue is because I use double-spaces after periods and there’s encoding issues there (only saw maybe one article that had mentioned that). The database itself does not “show” the A.
All fixed.
Best way to fix: take a dump of all the tables which were in latin1_swedish_ci collation, edit the sql to use utf8 instead of latin1, reimport it while letting it drop the previous table.
After that, the  will show up in the database table contents. So, run the following sql to fix. I only fixed the wp_posts table (specifically post_content) but there may be others that are affected.
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, ‘Â’, ”);
All fixed and pretty pretty. 🙂
Keith
