UTF8 trouble in "title" and "caption" fields

[brazzmonkey]

i'm having problems with accentuated chars in pictures' titles and caption. i upgraded from 1.3.x to 1.4.x and the problem appeared. i've been browsing these forums for 2 days, trying everything i could find that's related to utf-8, accents and special chars. here's a few things i already tried :
- changing header to use the correct utf-8 charset,
- changing collations in phpmyadmin to use utf-8 instead of western,
- used charsetmgr.php
- hacked functions.inc.php and themes.inc.php
- downloaded database content, convert file content to utf-8 and re-uploaded it to database

the latter actually worked, but now i get these weird chars in the database. at least this looks consistent from a user point of view, but this is plain boring and disturbing for a database administrator using phpmyadmin. this REALLY is a big mess, if you ask me.

[brazzmonkey]

*bump*