[vbplusme]

Coincidentally, I got this same error just today upgrading to 3.8.1. For me, if meant that I had some tables defined as latin1_swedish and some defined as latin1_general.

I actually want my database to suppose UTF8 rather than latin1 as my site serves an international community so I had to dump the database, delete it from my server and recreate it with the default collation I want. In the dump file, I need to do a global search and replace for latin1 and changed it to utf8, then I imported it to the new database and every thing was cleanly defined as UTF8 which is what I want. THEN, the upgrade worked correctly.

So, you can check this out yourself with phpmyadmin. check the collation column in your database. You will find some of them are different from the default.

You probably didn't but some hack you installed may have. this one likely "I installed ibProArcade v2.6.8+," I think the problem can be caused from using different versions of MySQL on multiple servers which is what I did. I moved from a mysql 4.X to a mysql 5.X and the defaults were set differently so when the hack created a new table it got defined with a different collation.

I am not sure you can change individual tables, i.e. dump it, delete it, reimport with the correct collation but you might want to try it.

HTH