t-p on "Clean up strange characters after installing"

-Be precise with charset compatibility in wp-config.php and your mySQL dbase. For example, define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); is not the same as define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8_unicode_ci');

- You may also try this plugin and see if this can sort out the issue for you: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/utf-8-database-converter/