Special characters issues

Hello!

I’m mindboggled with this one. Earlier this week, my site started displaying the special characters all wrong. I didn’t do nothing on my part that could originate this. No upgrade has been made to wordpress, since I’m with version 3 since it was first released with no problems.

Also, all of my text widgets (containing some simple HTML like links and images) are gone from the sidebar. (there was no theme upgrade).

I’m clueless about this. I managed to change the character set of the posts table to utf8, so the new posts are displaying correctly, the older ones still have issues. Tried the sanitize plugins and all, to no avail.

Any ideas guys?