Cyrillic viewing problem in iLife and Leopard environment

Question

Hello,
I'm new to mac, but otherwise a savvy pc user.
What I am trying to find in my mac is the equivalent of Windows' Control Panel -> Regional and Language Settings -> Advanced -> Language for non-Unicode programs -> (choose) Russian.
Basically, I've got a couple of russian songs and I sometimes type things in Cyrillic. The problem right now is that while I can type Cyrillic characters in a text body, it doesn't quite work out if I type something in the "address bar" of Safari or Firefox - all I get is "???????????" instead of characters. To add to the injury - when I import a song into iTunes library that has Cyrillic in the ID3 tags, iTunes shows the song name and artist in a gibberish form of accented latin characters. If iTunes was a mail client, the problem it's experiencing would have been easily solved by changing the character encoding -> from Unicode UTF-8 to Windows-1251 or KOIR-8R. Actually, the OS X should be aware of that, not just iTunes.
So how would I go about solving this issue?
I already have Russian input option in the input menu and in the
System Preferences ->International-> Languages the order is
English
Russian
(whatever latin-character language is next)
Mind you that I do NOT want Russian in my application menus or otherwise have a russian version of OS X. What I simply need is to have Leopard properly display the Cyrillic characters.
I would be grateful to hear any suggestions.
Cyrillic-wondering-ly,
aleksey

Answer 1

The problem right now is that while I can type Cyrillic characters in a text body, it doesn't quite work out if I type something in the "address bar" of Safari or Firefox - all I get is "???????????" instead of characters.
This is a known bug in Firefox, which they have to fix. Safari should have no problem. Could you send me a screenshot of what is happening (tom at bluesky dot org).
when I import a song into iTunes library that has Cyrillic in the ID3 tags, iTunes shows the song name and artist in a gibberish form of accented latin characters.
Sorry, Mac iTunes ID3 tags have to be in Unicode. There is no way to change the encoding to accept something else, you have to change the tags. Some more info is here:
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html#itunes