encoding problems on site.master page (asp.net mvc2) on production server (2003 with IIS 6)

I have a site that uses the Hebrew language.

All the pages looks great, expect from the text that is generated in site.master.

This text comes a gibberish.

This is from master page:

<ul id="menu">
                    <li>
                        <%: Html.ActionLink("לקוחות", "List", "Customers")%></li>

same code from any other page shows hebrew chars.

The result is either gibberish, or encoded gibberish:

 <div id="title">

                <h1>
                    îòøëú ðéäåì ùéáåõ èëðàéí</h1>
 开发者_运维问答           </div>
            <div id="menucontainer">
                <ul id="menu">
                    <li>
                        <a href="/Customers/List">&#236;&#247;&#229;&#231;&#229;&#250;</a></li>

tried to switch encoding in the browser but nothing gets me back to Hebrew.

This happens ONLY on production server, on my Dev machine (win7) it works fine. The views inside the master pages shows OK also on production.

Any ideas ?

My advice would be: ditch the IIS 6 and use IIS Express, which you can install on most old OS's. It does introduce another technology into the question but this technology is newer, easy to use, maintain and script and more suitable for this new range of web development technologies like MVC, etc.

So, if you have an option to select what you use and can make decisions about it, definitely go for it.

Alternatively, you can play around with server regional settings and stuff like that but you might end up losing lots of hours to this.