Anything in the chain that conflicts with that, such as Windoze-1252 or ISO-8859-1 or Latin-1, can be expected to cause problems.
This is a recent problem. It started around the time FR was having problems getting banned by Google's malware filter, apparently due to an FR page that linked to a malware sit. I would think the debugging process would start with the age-old question, What did I change last?
UTF-8 rules! The web should be UTF-8 end to end!
Oh yeah! UTF-8 always and often!
I checked out your markup theory. On the main page, the smart quotes related to this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3362771/posts
are *not* &# or &something markup. They’re straight UTF-8, and work.
[redacted]-imac:~ [redacted]$ hexdump freep2.txt
0000000 e2 80 9d 0a
0000004
But when you click the link, all the quotes are messed up.
I’ve a soft spot for 8859-1, but once you go UTF-8, you never go back.