Displaying utf-8 characters

I've integrated your Rich Text Editor into my classic ASP application and am running into a bit of a problem.  If I enter "special" characters (or more likely, my German/French/Czech/Polish etc. users enter their own character sets) everything works great.  However, if they come back to the information and try to edit it, the characters are converted to ASCII and look goofy.  I've narrowed this behaviour down to turning designMode on and off for the iFrame.  In other words, if I turn desgnMode off (or comment it out), the text gathered from my database displays beautifully in the text area but of course cannot be edited.  However, when I turn designMode on, the text no longer renders properly.

I've set my .asp session to (session.CodePage = 65001 '65001 is the code page for UTF-8) and my meta tag to (<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">).