Dr Byte - To answer some of your questions, the data almost ALWAYS seems to be in the ADDRESS field, and it's only with LinkPoint/Credit Card purchases. PayPal works just fine.

I am not so much interested in cleaning up the old data in the database......but I am mainly looking for any solution to fix this going forward (with new customer addresses).

I've been a long time ZC user from 2004, so I'm positive that a lot of these database collation issues are due from the old versions mixing/carrying over to the newest stuff.

I'm just wondering.......if I change all my tables (and fields) to match my DB_CHARSET, will that fix it "going forward?" I understand that this may not "convert" pre-existing data that's already stored in the database.

My only fear is that I don't want to CORRUPT (or break) any old data already stored in there. In other words, I don't want to fix the problem for new customers, but then find that all 10,000 of my preexisting customers can no longer checkout of our store because something got corrupted in the database, know what I mean?

Fortunately, this "invalid character" only happens when a customer registers an address with a foreign symbol, but I am trying to figure out some way to prevent that from happening (because the error message that the customer sees is simply that their credit card is declined......it doesn't tell them that it's due to an invalid character).

So I guess another solution would be to find a way to spit out the exact error to the customer (Invalid Character in your address.....please try again without the foreign character), but I don't know how to configure that.

Like I said, if manually changing the collation on the database won't SCREW UP the pre-existing records, then I will be fine with that. I am not trying to "fix" what is in there. I simply want to "not screw up" what's already in there, but eliminate this error from happening on NEW RECORDS which are created.

Hope that makes sense. If you have any other advice, please post it here for me.