I need to revoke most of my post below. What I found out afterwards is this:

1. if you do not use mysql_set_char mysql will NOT do any translations and thus store a utf8-character-byte as is. If you then retrieve this byte from the db and output it in a utf8 page it will show just fine BUT if other apps query this byte (expecting to find a latin1 byte) they will go wrong.

2. the 'bug' mentioned before only occurs if you use a ucase or lcase function in your statement (like: latin1_col = ucase('utf8 string')

Hope this helps, Ronald
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