Need help with Unicode stored in a Access database.

We built a web application a year and a half ago. Basically we stored two sets of content and displayed the set the user set their preference to. One set was English and the other was the local language. The content is displayed in asp (VB script) pages and Macromedia Flash movies. The database is MS Access 2000. The content gets into the Flash thought ASP pages that query the database and return value pairs to the Flash Movies.

The application has a Translation area for the local market to translate the content into their languages. This is done through ASP form pages.

This all worked fine for most of the markets the application been fielded in (Western Europe and some South American countries). When it was deployed to Russia we had a problem the locally entered Cyrillic went into the database as Unicode (If you opened the database you saw Unicode). This wasn't a problem for the asp pages but overwhelmed Flash which just displayed the content as a long Unicode string.

We revamped the program at that time (about 8 months ago) and put a Unicode converter into the Flash movies (All this really did was add the "/" escape char to the strings). We also upgraded all the Flash from 5 to 6 at that time. All was going fine...

Now the Polish.

When we were first approached with the problem the Polish market was experiencing with the application we thought just do another "Russin fix" to get it to work.

However when the Polish enter content into the database It seems to be something other that Unicode. They say they are putting Unicode in but it's not being stored that way. We need the database to display the special (Polish) characters (there are 16 of them) in Unicode to make our converter work.

Questions

In MS Access -

Why would the Russin's content be stored in Unicode and the Polish not?

Is there a way to force Access to store in Unicode (nchar?)

Is there a way in asp-VBscript we can encode the content as Unicode. (either going in or out)

Should we upgrade the Access to 2003 (the Russian one that works is 2000)

Any ideas what is happening here?

Thank you for reading this