Strange behavior when importing DB o local server
 

Hi all,

I'm having the same problems as I always had but I want to put an end to it. I'm running a forum in Spanish and every time I have to upload/download the database I get all my "spanish" characters (?, é, ?, ?, ?, ?, etc.) converted to "?".

Now, both my live and local servers are running MySQL with UTF-8 charset and latin_general_1 as the connection collation. My DB's tables are mostly latin_general_1 and my DB is latin_swedish_1.

When I import my DB into my local server I use latin_1 as the collation and the symbols appear. How can this be if both servers have the exact same configuration?

Thanks in advance,

EDIT: I found one BIG error now. If I do an export of my DB from my live server as a file, no matter what kind of compression I choose, the symbols appear. If I select any specific table and export it as SQL (copy & paste option) then my characters are displayed all right. How can this be? Does anyone know a solution for this? Is this problem of my live server's MySQL/phpMyAdmin problem?