Dear GiJOE,

the problem is exactly what you guess.

After a fresh installation of d3forum, I noticed that all the tables have latin1_swedish_ci (the only ones). So even if I do a simple data entry (without importing) the result is the same - "????????".

If I change, manually via phpMyAdmin, the field collation everything is working fine.

My hosting environment has MySQL 4.1.21 server. In contrary, in my local place that I have 5.0.24 I don't have any problem.

So probably I have to hack the mysql.sql file in order to declare the exact collation. The idea to change manually all the fields of all the tables using phpMyAdmin probably is too time demanding...

@Mikhail

Thanks for the info about encodings conversions, I usually play with ultraEdit too!