well if it can help you, I`ve had to delete and start over a few times over the last week... but thanks to Torvista, I figured out half of my problem. How are you tying in your special caracter...

ex: é : like this
Code:
é
or like this
Code:
é
it turned out I had the right coding when using é but had reverted to the é form after thinking I had found the right information.

So basically, that took care of part of the problem for me.

The rest of the problem is that the cart is perfect and showing properly when the customer isn`t logged in... as soon as I log in as a customer... the text is once again corrupted and doesn`t appear to be utf-8... so I`m searching still.