Problem with simplexml_load_file() and utf8 encoding

[Oxymen]

Hi.

I am trying to store/read information from a xml file using simplexml_load_file().
This works just fine until I want to store special characters like "æ,ø,å". This returned
an error saying that the input was not proper UTF-8. So I used utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()
when writing and reading the data. this seemed to work just fine untill I tried to use it in IE..
Firefox returns the characters as they should be, but IE returns either questionmarks or some other spesiel character.

Is it any way to work around the UTF-8 encoding which works without buggs?

thanks a lot.