What is the routine you've used ? Don't get it. Could you detail that steps ?
As for the chars, I always have problem with win-1251 chars when I switch to utf-8.
I wrote a wee dirty script to convert the win chars (the quotes, dash and the al), to normal chars. I dump the database, apply it and reimport the modified dump. However, if the chars are already screwed in the mysql database, that's probably not going to work.
