Newish to running php -- mbstring issue

I have a RHEL4 box here, installed with php and mbstring. I installed
mbstring the other day, and everything was workign fine. however after
a reboot, the special charachters are no longer being displayed....

Im not sure where to even begin trying to resolve this, as the phpinfo
page has:
config: '--enable-mbstring=shared' '--enable-mbstr-enc-trans' '--
enable-mbregex'
additional ini's parse: /etc/php.d/gd.ini, /etc/php.d/ldap.ini, /etc/
php.d/mbstring.ini, /etc/php.d/mysql.ini

mbstring
Multibyte Support enabled
Japanese support enabled
Simplified chinese support enabled
Traditional chinese support enabled
Korean support enabled
Russian support enabled
HTTP input encoding translation enabled
Multibyte (japanese) regex support enabled

mbstring extension makes use of "streamable kanji code filter and
converter", which is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public
License version 2.1.

Directive Local Value Master Value
mbstring.detect_order no value no value
mbstring.encoding_translation On On
mbstring.func_overload 0 0
mbstring.http_input pass pass
mbstring.http_output pass pass
mbstring.internal_encoding no value no value
mbstring.language Neutral Neutral
mbstring.substitute_character no value no value

Here is what is installed:

[root@gobo etc]# rpm -qa | grep -i php
php-ldap-4.3.9-3.1
php-gd-4.3.9-3.1
php-4.3.9-3.1
php-mysql-4.3.9-3.1
php-mbstring-4.3.9-3.1
php-pear-4.3.9-3.1


Any help would be appreciated.