Crazy character set mismatch

[ketkoota]

I am trying to get my forum to be displayed in utf8. I believe that my data is actually utf8 but the site only displays properly when the forum Language parameter is set to windows-1256.

I have spent quite a bit of time researching my issue. I thought that I needed to perform a character set conversion. I used the vbulletin article on converting vbulletin to utf8. I hired a SQL guy to do the conversion. After some work, he said that he could not help me because the data was apparently already unicode.

I need some help! I am integrating vbulletin with joomla via jfusion for a site launch on aug 1. If I cannot solve this problem, I won't be able to launch.

By the way, I am having a similar issue with any modules I use to display forum content in Joomla. The content will not display correctly expect in firefox. Apparently firefox is smart enough to display it. IE chokes.

I posted this to support, but I am under a time crunch and figured I would see if anyone else out there had any ideas... Moderator, please feel free to delete this post if I have committed a faux pas here.