About to commit sepeku - need UTF-8 ...getting ISO-8859-1

[rovnak]

Deep breath ... deep breath. Grit teeth.

Ok, I've been chasing my tail off and on for about two weeks on this crap.

I have done every recommend thing that I can find in a desperate attempt to get my vBulletin forum to generate UTF-8 encoded pages.

Well, here's the rub. The pages ARE UTF-8 encoded. But for some stinking reason the HTTP Header continues to specify ISO-8859-1.

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

This is driving me absolutely, freaking nuts. WHAT HAVEN'T I DONE?

Ok, starting on a COMPLETELY NEW scraped box. Latest everything, except vBulletin which is 3.6.4

-- My MySQL database is ALL UTF.

-- I installed vBulletin with the config.php UTF-8 line uncommented
$config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

-- I modifed the headerinclude template in vBulletin so that the Meta tag specifies UTF-8
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

-- Apache is set for UTF-8
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Yet, despite ALL THIS, the freaking http head continues to specifiy
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

WHAT MORE CAN I DO FOLKS?

At first, I thought it was something on the shared host. So I waited two weeks until I could get my own dedicated server set up. Now, I have the totally clean, dedicated server. I installed all this crap, and lo and behold I have the same freaking problem still.

I thought - "it can't be vBulletin ... the page is really UTF-8. The meta tag says UTF-8 ... it must be Apache or PHP"

but, now I don't know, now I think maybe it IS vBulletin f'n me. Because, on the exact same server, I can run wikimedia and the wikimedia pages come down to my client with CORRECT HTTP headers.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

So, who or what can be the sticking point? This is driving me nuts, as you can see. I will be eternally grateful for the answer to this riddle.