Please, see my comment on 887183.
In addition I can add, that the mySql version is 5.0.45 and the following config items are in my config.inc.php file:
$cfg['DefaultLang'] = 'en-utf-8';
$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_unicode_ci';
$cfg['FilterLanguages'] = '';
$cfg['DefaultCharset'] = 'utf-8';
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] = TRUE;
Data enter the database as UTF-8 data perfectly OK when not using phpMyAdmin
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