The server is running Windows 2003 with IIS 6.0.3790.1830 x86 (iis.dll). My database server is Microsoft SQL Server 2000. My PHP version is 5.3.

The original application is hosted on appserv1 and it's database is on dbserv1. It's working fine, everything is tuned up, running great.

It was needed to place the same application (different modules) on another server, for other uses, so I copied the database on dbserv2, configured appserv2 to host the application, so I achieved 2 almost identical copies. Both dbserv1 and dbserv2 use the same encoding, both appserv1 and appserv2 are on IIS6 with the same PHP configurations. I also tried my best to have the same settings in the IIS. I also made sure that I pass the encoding information both in the HTTP headers and in the meta tags with http-equiv. Both applications use utf-8.

The Problem is that the copy of the application doesn't display the non-ASCII characters normally in the browser, even if the browser detects correctly the UTF-8 encoding of the page. First I thought it was a database issue, given the fact that MSSQL 2000 doesn't support UTF-8, and instead it uses UCS-2, but when I redirected the application on appserv2 to work with the database on dbserv1, it had the same encoding problems.

This is why I am asking in what way I can make it work.

thank you for reading.