bullwinkle

I've just upgraded a site from MySQL 4.0.24 running on PHP 4 to MySQL 5.0.19 running on PHP 5. When I migrate the data in SQL format the UTF-8 special characters don't work. So to get things running, I saved the data locally which removed all the special characters and everything worked. However, when I go back to add in these special characters like £ it corrupts that record and the data after that special character is lost. I'm running Postnuke and I've looked through the code and I don't see anything that would prevent this from working - it used to work. Can anyone help me debug this problem - I'm just not familiar enough with character encoding. Thanks.