What a day for updates... Anyway, I have by virtue of fixing apostrophes for someone else, fixed the Chinese Big5 problem... The new version of Apache puts a default encoding header of UTF-8 which overrules the META tag that DearDiary puts out. Thus, pages were actually broken for everyone, it just happens that the characters us westerners use most often are the same in ISO and UTF-8 so I didn't notice.
The problem is now fixed thanks to an excellent article I found at http://www.padawan.info/web/debugging_charset_encoding_mismatch_with_apache.html - thanks Francois!
There's other news too... Whilst hunting those few bugs I have been zipping up Hamipiks so that'll be back soon (there's 4 GIGS of pictures to move across) and I have installed MySQL 4 on the server because by default it comes with 3.23. 3.23 is needed by the Plesk control panel which runs everything behind the scenes, so there are 2 databases now on the server, and I finally have gotten that running which is a good bonus. It means that at some point I may well get the search feature back online :-) Yay I hear you cry.
OK, there's still a lot to do, but putting MySQL 4 on should give a nice speed improvement (which won't really notice until things get busy again but anyway). If you come across any pages that I've missed changing the database connection information, drop me a note.
OK, nose back to the grindstone now - thank you everyone for your patience - and thanks to everyone for the positive comments you've left too.
Steve.