Upgrading Drupal

When I first created my Drupal DB, back in the 4.4.x days, I used PhpMyAdmin. Apparently that was a bad idea, since it has a bug that it ignores the encoding of the imported schema. This was never a problem, though, and I never noticed that my schema as latin1_swedish_ci until a week ago when I decided to try 4.7 -- which made all my accents look like random text.

Dear friends,

I just updated to 4.7 and now i am having so many problems with the layout. I figured out it is drupal that is reformating the html to screw up all my posts. If you embed an object such as a flash .swf drupal will do this

I've tried to upgrade from 4.5.x to 4.6.x several times and it fails every time. Now with 4.7 being released, I felt a real urgency to accomplish this feat. So last night I tried again. I was following the Upgrading from Previous Versions howto (4.5 to 4.6.3) last night and although the update.php step went fine - all okays, I still got an error when I tried to happily go to administration pages.

Past errors escape me, but the showstopper last night was:

Hi, i'm getting the

Multibyte string input conversion in PHP is active and must be disabled. Check the php.ini mbstring.http_input setting. Please refer to the PHP mbstring documentation for more information.

Error on the settings page.

My host is unable to disable this in my htaccess because of something to do with it being an apache module instead of proper php. They are also unwilling to disable it on the machine because of the other clients. (I'm with Lonex)

Is there no way i can stop drupal complaining about this?

how to transfer the content - blogs and users - from the old site Drupal-4.6 on the new Drupal-4.7 without loss?