Multibyte (Japanese/Chinese) Text Mangled in Post, Comment, and other fields

If anyone has ANY ideas about what could be the problem here, I’d reeeeally appreciate your help.

I spent all weekend trying to install WordPress, and after a LOT of fiddling, and configuring, I finally got everything working (yay). I made my own template and configured everything the way I wanted it….

Then, when I went to POST an entry, I saw to my dismay that any text in multibyte languages like Chinese or Japanese gets HORRIBLY mangled. Not thoroughly, some words or even phrases make it through, but most of it is completely screwed up.

I looked around the forums, and found this post , among other things, which seems to address a similar issue, but the solutions provided all reference pieces of code that are more than a year old and have been deprecated…

It seems that it has something to do with the htmltrans function. I guess this was addressed before, though, because the option to disable htmltrans has been removed, and searching for it in the code reveals a new function, htmltranswinuni, which implies that the function has been rewritten to play nice with windows and unicode.

Still, the site is very screwed up. In frustration, I ripped it down (thankfully, I backed it up). Then I tried a Japanese-localized version , WordPress 1.5 ME, which stands for multilingual edition.

THANKFULLY, when I installed it, all the forms, interface, etc. was in Japanese, and seemed to work just fine. However, the test entry that was automatically created was already mangled like crazy, as was the default comment posted on it.

Here’s the site:

https://128.97.251.236/wordpress/

Yeah, I switched the DNS over to my new server, but I re-did the ENTIRE server, deleting all the files and re-installing wordpress, so the entire site is broken, and the new setup isn’t even set up with a skin to use a stylesheet or anything, but the text is all there. If you know Japanese, you can see: all the text is fine, and looks great, EXCEPT for the entry text itself.

So, here’s a summary of my problem:

-Installed on Apache 2, with absolute latest MySQL (downloaded and setup on friday) and latest PHP (ver 5.whatever, downloaded and installed on friday). WordPress 1.5 Wacky Japanese localized version. However, I installed the normal, English verson and had the exact same problem:

-Chinese/Japanese text works FINE anywhere I hard-code it or put it in the layout. However, in the entry text, the comment text, title, or author name, it’s BADLY mangled.

-MySQL is set up to encode in UTF-8.
-Server is set with AddDefaultEncoding off, so wordpress pages should and do all display as UTF-8, just like they should.
-I have no wacky caching schemes or anything enabled.
-I have no plugins whatsoever enabled.

-I am dying here. I know/suspect the problem is with some function that process the text in some way, but I have really no idea what.

I know I could just switch to some other CMS or whatever, but I spent literally ALL weekend tweaking WordPress and making the skin and writing the layout and everything. I’d REALLY like this to work.

Thanks in advance.

(p.s. yeah, I know the layout/links are broken. I need to log in to administrator and set the “site location” away from localhost, but I don’t have the pw with mere here now. As soon as I figure this out I’m going to reinstall the english version of wp anyway and then reapply the fix and the layout I made)