MSSQL 2000 -> MySQL5 - Special characters problem

[Sonny Bonds]

When trying to migrate from a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to MySQL 5, special characters like á é í ó ú ñ and pound symbol won't be transferred properly.

When queried using the MySQL Query Browser, these characters are shown as "black boxes", and when queried from applications they are shown as "?". I.E., the word "CAÑA" is displayed as "CA?A".

I have used UTF-8 as the charset, since using Latin1 will migrate no data for tables containing records with special characters.

Does anyone know how to properly migrate this data? I have seen the issue raised before in the forums, with no replys (and those topics are closed now).