[Typo3] Japanese oddysee

[Jörg Schaller]

Hello,

I'm still stuck with a database whose special characters get destroyed
on dumping and reinserting, I hope that somebody may give me a pointer
this time - I'm getting desperate!

My provider is running
php 4.3.11
MySQL 4.1.11

I have just converted database is now converted to 
MyISAM utf8-general-ci
Collation utf-8

because before it was in latin1 and every time I made a dump and
reinserted the database, all japanese characters were broken.
Something is really wrong in the communication between typo3 and mysql
4.1.11 there.

Now, When I try to paste japanese text into a content element, I get
error 102 ("These fields are not properly updated in database:
(bodytext) Probably value mismatch with fieldtype.") and shortly after
that, Japanese text appears with some characters discarded. The
changes are not saved, however.

I have always had BEForcecharset=utf-8 activated, so I thought maybe I
should change multiplyDBfieldSize and set that to 2 and 3 to try. With
these settings, the compare in the database analyzer fails with the
message ==SQL engine parse ERROR: Field type unknown!: near
"set('0','1') NOT NULL default ''==

I am totally stumped. In utf-8 MyISAM format I cannot edit any fields
and in iso-8859 MyISAM format I cannot make reliable backups.

HELP!

Jörg