re: mssql and latin characters

Windows and Unix platforms use different Latin-1 character set  
encodings that are not entirely compatible. Windows uses  
"windows-1252" (also referred to as "cp1252" by some platforms) and  
Unix systems typically use the "iso-8859-1" character set. The first  
thing I would try is changing your PHP code to this:

<?php
mssql_connect('server','user','pass');
mssql_select_db('db');

$r = mssql_query(“set names cp1252”);
$r = mssql_query(“select some_column from some_table”);
$d = mssql_fetch_assoc($r);

echo $d['some_column'];
?>

The "set names <charset>" query tells the MySQL server that you want  
to send and receive data to/from the server in the cp1252  
(windows-1252) encoding instead of its default encoding (which again  
is probably iso-8859-1). Hopefully this will solve your problem.

Regards,
Cary Clark