> Now Mysql 4.1.12 is up and running. I have been
> changing tables to utf8 and all that sort of
> things. I think that this side of the matter is OK
> now.
Good.
One thing. Unless you compiled MySQL from source using --with-charset=utf8 option and configured PHP to use that client library, the character set of the client library used by PHP is latin1. The configuration in my.cnf doesn't matter because it works only for mysqld and mysql client programs in bin direcotry. So, you need to make sure that the client character set, when the PHP program connect to MySQL server, is set to utf8. The way to do this without re-compiling MySQL is to set a server variable in [mysqld] section of my.ini file as follows.
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'
For init_connect variable, see
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html.
If you are going to administer this server, it is highly recommended to read the following page of the manual and clearly understand how the character sets work in MySQL 4.1.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset.html