Well thats the thing, nothing ever changed. Encoding is still UTF8, first 2 days after realease it was iso 8859-1 and i had same problem, however i changed that to UTF8 in Plugin, TCP Server, Database, and Site and it worked till i changed to new database server. And DB itself is a exact replica of old db.
I am aware of the rich text issue with jMon. And its something i am working on. I had same problem when i first wrote jMon, then i only had to do a very small change to make it work. This time however i am unable to find out why its not working because nothing has really changed. only change is that slq server now runs a as a dedicated server and not on same machine as the server for the plugin.