If the funny characters appear only in messages you receive, is it possible that someone sending you the messages didn't change their browser to a proper encoding and is sending you "corrupted messages?" If you receive junk it's likely you'll see junk, and there's not much to be done about it at your end.

Posts here sometimes show similar corrupted characters, and I've been specutlating (talking to myself in the HTML practice thread) that it may be due to "curly quotes" creeping into html codes and/or URLs, but the common "funnies" I've been seeing are Ò Ó Ô Õ Ð and Ñ, and seem to come almost exclusively from "the person using a Mac."

John