> Its CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE UTF8
>
>I am using FB 2.0 as this is what our clients are using. I have just restored the data on to a FB 2.5 server and everything works >perfectly !!!!!
>
>Interestingly the issue with FB 2.0 and IBO appears to be reading the data, as the restored database shows with the data was inserted
>correctly when I was doing my initial testing.
>
>Any suggestions. Our plan was to move our code base to Delphi XE2 / Unicode and release. In a later release we would move all users
>from FB 2.0 to FB 3 (when its released). We really don't want to force users to change database at the same time as doing a major code
>and component upgrade.

I know nothing about this, but http://www.destructor.de/firebird/charsets.htm makes me suspect that whereas the UTF-8 character set was introduced in Firebird 2.0, the UTF-8 collation only got there in Firebird 2.1 and your options (short of writing a collation by yourself) are basically using the UCS_BASIC or UNICODE collations.

I hope my suspicions are wrong and that there is a simpler solution to your problem.
Set