Is it remotely possible that one of them thinks it is UTF-16? A UTF data-stream should not be "double encoded." The multibyte character sequences are self-identifying as such – when you look at any byte (or 16-bit word) you can tell if it is part of a sequence, and those characters won't be "encoded" a second time. Do all the players in this game know to expect UTF? A hex-dump program can be very helpful here ... you need to see the actual bytes.