Money flows in......

What did I say then?

Drupal : Change DB and table collation to Unicode (UTF-8)

What a life-saver this was.

Change all tables to Unicode:

for table in `mysql -h-u -p -e "show tables" | grep -v Tables`; do mysql -h-u -p -e "alter table $table convert to character set utf8" ; done

Change DB to Unicode :

mysql -h -u -p -e "alter database character set utf8";