Reproducible Login Issue (utf8 = blank login page)

Hi!

Ok, here’s the trick: I need some accented characters that aren’t included in the basic latin-1 charset. There’re some texts in the template .php files. So instead of using HTML character codes in the text, which makes editing the text really painful, I decided to save the template .php files in utf8. Now the text looks fine, and I can easily read and edit it when necessary. However, converting some of the template .php files came with a major drawback: whenever I try to log in, I can only see a blank login page. If I overwrite the utf8 .php files with the old ANSI .php files, the login works again.

Question #1: How can I get wp to display an error message instead of a blank screen?

Question #2: Any ideas how can I get best of both worlds (i.e., keep the utf8 encoding, or an equivalent solution, and remain able to log in)?