phpMyAdmin collations - latin1_swedish_ci??

[connectionscentres]

Using phpMyAdmin 2.6.0-pl3 and MySQL 4.1.7.

Anyone know why
(1) all of a sudden PhpMyAdmin displays a collation column for all my tables
(2) the collation for fields of Char or VarChar is set to latin1_swedish_ci
(3) when I try to run SQL it complains of Illegal mix of collations between

(latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_unicode_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='

(4) how I now seem to have MySQL charset and MySQL connection collation settings on my main control pannel and
(5) how I cant change the latter from utf8_unicode_ci to blank?

I am at a loss. Is this a bug in phpMyAdmin? Is there a simple way to get it back to normal?

Cheers.

 

[connectionscentres]

Seems that this is an issue caused by upgrading to MySql 4.1

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=328641&seqNum=3

which introduces charsets and collations, the default ones being Latin1 and latin1_swedish_ci respectively.

The illegal mix of collations issue must be because the data was from a MySql 4.0 database, thus adding somthing like the following

WHERE `batch` LIKE CONVERT( _utf8 'GD'
USING latin1 )
COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci

solves the problem in the short term.

However, because my testing server is 4.1 and my live (hosted) server is still 4.0 this kind of sql presumably wouldnt work live when deployed in PHP.(?)