special characters DB retrieval

When using RTE, I type in a text, some of the words contain special characters such as cedilla, tildes, acute accent, etc). The text gets recorded in the database(mssql 2000) correctly. However when I retrieve the record from the DB, all these special characters become a 2-byte garbagge. I have tried all the entries in the browser_encoding_page file but none worked. Has anyone found a way out of it?