Do you mean that the option in ADMIN for the character set is not sticking?

I believe he means he has to tell his browser to use a different character encoding.

I don't know for Artz, but for me everything was set to work in utf-8 from the begining.
And it worked all right till I upgraded to 1.4
I didn't change anything during the upgrade, so something must has gone wrong when upgrading database's tables. But what? That is the question.