I am not seeing the array_ahift() problem. I did make some changes. I doubt they would have fixed that, but maybe try the nightly for tonight.
It sounds like UTF-8 characters are stored in your database, so just changing the tables to UTF-8 would work. But, of course, you may have mixed character sets, so you may have to edit some of your data.
But, all this did not change on 1.1.7, so what is the charset value on the admin gallery options tab?