PDO and unicode?

in my initial testing with PDO it seemed like it was handling unicode just fine, but it turns out it is converting any non-standards characters to the html encoding and saving it as that. that works fine for what it is, but much of my data is pre-existing and in actual unicode, and anytime i query that i get a question mark (actual ascii 63, not just a character that cant display) returned from the database. for what it's worth, i'm using php5.1.3 snapshot, and PDO_ODBC connection to a SQL Server database. it works fine with unicode through asp, so i know it isnt a database issue. i expected issues chopping up unicode in php, but i had planned on at least being able to get it to and from the database. is anyone using unicode with PDO? thanks, --travis