UTF-8 is making me lose my mind

[eluser]Geomancer[/eluser]
I have tried everything, from a lot of websites and this great forum:

-Saving every file to UTF-8
-Using this header:

Code:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

-Using the tag:

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

-Every database, table and column is utf8_unicode_ci, as in the database.config file.
-In .htaccess UTF-8 is default.

I have simplified everything and I am usign a single controller/view to make an insert into the DB, with special characters, which show ok in the browser, but are inserted like this: á é í ó ú ñ ¿

If I change the charset in the meta tag to iso, the characters are inserted ok in the db, but they show bad in the browser.

If I utf_encode the strings before inserting, they insert ok, but I will have to decode everything and It is not the point, it should work fine.

I really don't know what else to do, any help will be much appreciated.

Edit: I am using Doctrine, could this be the reason?