Yes, I understand. Probably it's Delphi. Anyway I had same problems with Delphi, in my case the solutions was:
TNT components - the better solution for Delphi 5- Delphi 2008 because components supports WideStrings
Delphi 2009 - Delphi 2010 - because they natively supports UnicodeStrings
Changing program codepage - not an ideal solution, but for known language it is very nice (we're supposing that using one language search results, like all form texts will be english or in selected language codepage). GetLocaleInfo helped me so much