[dba-Tech] Bizarre Font event

I'm working with a guy in San Francisco. The app is Access + MySQL back
end. We use a cool MySQL IDE called Navicat, one of whose virtues is easy
backups.

I did a little demo app of some concepts we're exploring vis-a-vis his big
app. I sent my colleague a zip containing the Access FE and the MySQL
backup. He restored it on his server, set up a DSN and ran the demo.

The demo works fine, in terms of functionality. But for some reason, some
of the text fields are displayed in Chinese characters. An examination of
the tabledefs within Access reveals that Access thinks these fields are
binary, when in fact they are just text. How this happened, or in which
piece of software, I have no idea.

Has anyone ever seen this sort of behaviour before? Or know what can be
done to fix it?

TIA,
Arthur