Special characters coming through messed up (CF7)

Hi,

I have a form which users need to be able to paste text into the javascript text editor (tinyMCE) from a range of sources. It's then processed by a coldfusion page which stores the data in a MySQL db. When I dump out #FORM# on the processing page, the characters are there how I want them, but when they are inserted into the db, they appear as the little squares with 00XX inside, or as strange non-ascii characters that display all messed up when read out.

I've tried setting the charset to utf-8 but no luck. I had written a function that converts the special characters to their appropriate html codes before inserting into the db but they do not get as far as the function before they are turned into the messed up characters, even though it would appear nothing is touching them - this function was working locally on my windows server, but now doesn't when I upload to the live linux server. By the time they get to the db they are unrecognisable characters - I will try pasting some of the characters the user is pasting in below separated by comma:

£,€,–,—,‘,’,“,”,

I have tried pretty much everything I can think of... thanks to anyone who can help.

T