One of our customers has reported that Access 97 appears to work better with double-byte character sets than Access 2000. Here is what he has to say:

Until today, I was using Access 2000 .mdb file to store my customer data in Japanese, and used a line of code, CodePage = 932 so the ASP scripts would display the correct characters in the browser. But after I converted the db file into older version format (Access97), I don't have to use that line anymore. This means that I don't have to change code every time I upload my ASP program files to make sure they work fine (in our test environment, on our Japanese PC, we don't have to put CodePage=932, of course).

Another problem we had with Access 2000 .mdb files was that ASPMail did not seem to work right with CodePage=932. When we use ASPMail component and CodePage=932 in the same page, ASPMail cannot display 2 byte characters properly in the e-mail. For example, when we want to send e-mail to a person whose information, name and e-mail, are stored in an Access 2000 .mdb file, we first retrieve the info from the db, and then apply it to the ASPMail properties. We have to use CodePage=932 to display the Japanese text right on the web page, but this caused the Japanese characters in the e-mail to get messed up. However, with Access 97, everything seems to be working fine.

Our thanks to Tomonori of MIS Okinawa for these tips.