Do you have any charset stuff in your my.cnf or any UseEncoding stuff in your proftpd.conf? Is your box 100% up to date? Do you have the mysql devel stuff installed? When I’ve seen these types of errors in the past, they’ve been because of one of these things - either the program connecting to mysql has hardcoded something that it shouldn’t, mysql has hardcoded something that it shouldn’t, files needed are missing, or updates were needed.