I actually just completely removed my XOOPS site and reinstalled it with 2.3.3 and am rebuilding. I have a couple issues that I am confused about.

one is the strange replacement of punctuation in the main text portion of the site. here's an example from my news section although it is happening over the site:

?EAGLES OVER LONDON is a terrific film with one of my favorite storylines ever,? Quentin Tarantino said at the film?s Los Angeles premiere in 2008. ?You?re in for a real treat!? Exclusive bonus features on the disc include footage of Tarantino hosting the film?s premiere in ?Eagles Over Los Angeles?, plus

http://www.shockingimages.com/modules/news/

also, in my smartsection area, I get this error message when clicking on the first few articles in that section:

"Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, <email address> and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log."

Im not really sure why this happened since all I did was just add a new article to a catagory and then it was messed up and the items in that section are all getting the same error:

sample of the error:
http://www.shockingimages.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1185


here's the main catagory with all the articles:
http://www.shockingimages.com/modules/smartsection/category.php?categoryid=1


any insights would be appreciated.

Edit by Ghia: removed email address to prevent SPAM

You have set your site to use UTF-8, but your database is probably not.
Read the release notes about this for the ISO setting.