Japanese characters in left pane

Question

I have a project that has been translated into Japanese, and
the left pane of my FlashHelp system does not render the characters
correctly. The funny thing is that I got it to work in another
project that was translated, one that I think was built in X5 (or
possibly earlier) and has a skin that RoboHelp says should be
updated when I generate the output. I don't dare change it now, and
it seems to work fine.
Unfortunately, I didn't make a record of exactly how I got
that to work
, but I seem to remember it had to do with embedding
Japanese characters in the Flash skin files. Fonts are also
declared in the skin .fhs file and the accompanying XML file, and
I'm not sure how they interact, but it seems that the fonts in the
Flash files supercede those in the skin file.
In my newer project, the toolbar buttons show up in Japanese,
as do the "terms" and "definitions" headings in the glossary and
the index keyword prompt. It's the TOC entries, glossary terms, and
index terms that have the problem, and they are all driven by the
file skin_textnode.swf. As long as the other files are set to Arial
or Arial Unicode MS in Flash, they display Japanese correctly, even
if Japanese isn't embedded (using "anti-alias for animation").
Without Japanese embedded in skin_textnode.fla, I get this kind of
nonsense in the left pane:
検索する.
But with Japanese embedded, I get symbols like paragraph symbols,
plus-or-minus signs, and daggers. I have also saved the .hhc file
(the TOC) and the .hhk (index) in UTF-8 format using Notepad, but
no change there. The junk characters also show up in the overlaying
window when clicking a term in the index, and that's driven by
skin_index.fla. I've tried the font and character embedding with
that file. I have tried changing "font-family:Arial" in the skin
file to both "font:"Arial Unicode MS"" and "font:"Arial"". No
difference.
I have compared files with that earlier project. As far as I
can tell, I have done things comparably, but the junk characters
persist in the left pane. It doesn't appear that there are
substantial differences between the way the old and new skins are
executed to cause the Japanese to work in one and not the other.
Any ideas that may help me make this work again? I'm using RoboHelp
6, Windows XP SP2, IE 6. (In theory, making this work for Japanese
will also solve my problem for Russian. I'm hoping the language
capabilities of RH7 handle all of this better so I don't have to
use these work-arounds for non-Roman characters.)
I know this is a load of information, but I've tried to
describe the circumstances adequately without writing the great
American novel. I'll clarify anything that's needed. Thanks,
Ben

Answer 1

Solved: I found once more that the TOC, glossary, and index
information is pulled from files in the whxdata folder:
whtdata...xml, whgdata...xml, and whidata...xml, respectively,
which are all in UTF-8 format. The Japanese characters have to be
changed in these files, but they get overwritten during a build, so
they have to be stored with the correct characters in another
location. Fortunately, our glossary will probably not be changing,
but the TOC and index will grow as the project moves forward, so
this will take some babysitting.
This all leads me to wonder why RoboHelp generates copies of
the .glo, .hhk, and .hhc files into the output folder when it's the
XML files that are used instead...