Actually that's not the solution but running away from it. There is a heavy footprint of customers and huge market on windows too and so not that easy to migrate and convince in market.
Regards...
I am aware of the heavy presence of Microsoft in the market place and the huge inertia of Microsoft dominated companies (even where management would like to change), hence I was not trying to push upgrading to Linux too strongly for this particular situation - more light hearted exasperation!
None-the-less there are more and more companies making that move - as there are a whole raft of very good reasons to do so.
If the sole reason for going to Linux was the collation problem, then it would probably be considered by most people to be a silly reason.
Cheers, Gavin
P.S. Once a Senior Systems Analyst left the company I was working for to become the DP manager of an IT department. I spoke to him shortly after and he said it was an 'IBM shop' - about ten years later he was at the same place, but he now said it was a 'Microsoft shop'. The dominant technology that appears set in stone, does eventually change despite the market inertia – my first commercial languages were FORTRAN & COBOL on minicomputers & IBM style mainframes, now I use Java on Linux.
Hmm. Don't want to digress here and loose the topic context. Here would really appreciate if there are any suggestions for UTF-8 collation on Windows?