Everything is western characters. Whatever is set b default by WordPress. As for the encoding of permalinks, only slugs seem to be stored in the db under the posts table and permalinks are written on the fly via rewrite rules (not stored).
Update:
I forgot we had installed it on a 3rd blog as well to replace StatPress (bad with resources) with. Upon looking at that one the stats link worked, and switching to column also displayed views in the column instead of just “0” as well as stats when you click on it. That one was using version 3.4.3. Updated to the latest and it still works. I can’t find a single difference between the three blogs though outside of the following.
I will refer to the blogs as 1 (the main one that created this question), 2 (the second one to test an compare this whole time) and 3 (the latest one mentioned that actually works). This 3rd blog, the permalinks are selected as “post name” where the other two blogs are “custom” with “/%category%/%postname%/ ” in the box. I obviously can’t change that now though to see if that affects anything, as that would destroy the SEO karma of the site (all of the hundreds of pages will become broken links on search engines).
I don’t know if knowing this helps or not.