This's what happens: when into a form (I'm using Struts framework) I enter a word like "luned�", the last word turns out with a couple of different characters. It isn't a DB error, because it happens even if the form comes back due an error made by the user.
Here are a couple more question to investigate: Does the character make it OK to the server? (The fact that it doesn't make it back to the browser OK doesn't that it wasn't OK when it got to the server.) Is it stored OK in the DB? Is the DB set up for whatever encoding you're using?