Thanks, Peter.
I have never seen oe turned into "ö" by anything in MySQL. Or ss to "ß". (Some collations will equate those strings.) I would suspect the OS. What client are you using? Are you typing these characters? Pasting them?
Have you verified that the bytes it the table(s) are in the encoding declared for their columns? (See the SELECT HEX() technique in my doc.)
As for 5.0 vs 5.5, etc -- I have seen no relevant changes between 4.1 and 5.5, except for the German sharp-s.
> The byte sequence "oe" is exactly the same in UTF8 as in ASCII as in ISO-8859-1.
Is it this?...
mysql> SELECT HEX('oe');
+-----------+
| HEX('oe') |
+-----------+
| 6F65 |
+-----------+
SELECT HEX("ö") will be 2 hex characters for latin1 (F6); 4 for utf8 (C3B6).
http://www.danshort.com/ASCIImap/indexhex.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00f6/index.htm
> Since our server gives you HTML pages in ISO-8859-1 by default
Use the <meta...> thingie at the top of pages you generate.
> it is going behind my back and converting "oe" to "ö"
I'm wondering if IE8 or Win-8 is being "too smart". As in, somehow thinking you are German and allowing you the shorthand "oe" for for o-umlaut.
There are sooo many layers of code trying to either "do the right thing" or "help you", that it is hard to debug problems like yours.