Character Set Problems

My series of questions pertain to web pages and character sets (and Access 2000).

I'm writing a web site. It's a mixture of html and ASP files and is required to display foreign words and names in their romanized format. So I'll have characters such as: C (in case you can't see this properly it's an upper case C with a 'v' [caron] on top), n (n with a 'v' [caron] on top), ð (o with thing [?] on top), ï (i with two dots [diaeresis]),
u (u with a bar [?] on top) etc. etc. There are many such characters.

These words and names are are in html form select boxes and display correctly in a browser. These html files being saved as UTF-8 as opposed to ANSI.

Some html files write cookies with these words and names as data for other html files to read and display. These other html files display the characters correctly even though they're ANSI and not UTF-8 files.

Some html files send this data to ASP files for inserting in to an Access 2000 database. The database is not saving all of these characters correctly; some it does, others it replaces with other characters!

Some ASP files read this data from the database and display it. These characters are not being displayed correctly, even the ones the database does stores correctly.

Basically I'm losing the accentuation and getting plain English characters, or I'm getting something unexpected. If these characters are hard-coded in to the html file and it's saved as UTF-8 it's fine. If they're not hard coded in to the html or ASP file, irrespective of whether the file is saved as UTF-8 or ANSI I have problems (with the exception of the cookie reading html files!).

I've tried adding the <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> meta tag to the html and ASP pages (immediately after the html head tag), but this makes things worse rather than better due to mis-mapping of characters. I've tried using XP's Arial Unicode MS font instead of normal Arial - it didn't work either.

So questions...

Can anyone suggest what the problem is?
Can anyone suggest a resolution?
How do you make Access 2000 recognize/use other/alternate character sets?
If I override the server's http content-type with my own character set meta tag (as above) can I have multiple character sets?
If so, which character sets?

All suggestions and help received with many thanks.

Regards

damn bodged up this first post. see 1 below.

Hey, im not really sure on this but cant u use the thing where its like &sumot;

http://www.bigbaer.com/reference/ch...y_reference.htm

I agree... using entities could solve all your problems (including the database)...

Although monkey chose an icky looking page to link to (it needsa white background to show the characters better! W3's HTML4 DTD or a visual representation)

Storing the actual entity (the ampersand and number value... ex, ♥) in the database might fix that problem... Also, if you choose this route, I'd advise using the number values... last I heard, not all browsers support the words...

Ye my link is very bad. do a search for better link....sorry.