Hi,

I'm new here but I just wanted to say that I've observed a similar problem when updating from beta 26 to RC1.

The forum I'm using is in Spanish and all the caracters with accents á ó ü, or letters as ñ ... suddenly were badly displayed.

In fact, the situation is:
Server in US
Local windows version Spanish

I don't really know what was the problem but I solved it deleting the line 42 in functions.inc.php:

// @mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8', $connid);

By the way, a wonderful program!