Character sets, encodings and such can be quite confusing. Working with international clients has taught me the following principals for problem-free "i18n" support:

• Do NOT specify a default character set in:
  • httpd.conf (or other conf files / .htaccess files)
  • php.ini (or other php conf files)

• DO specify a character set in:
  • PHP Header directive --OR--
  • HTML META tag

And in /etc/my.cnf:

  character-set-server={your default}
  character-set-client={your default}

On a case-by-case basis, MySQL can be overridden in the connectionstring to specify utf8 like such in the connection setup portion of thePHP script:

  mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
  mysql_query("SET CHARACTER_SET 'utf8'");