jQuery, ajax and click functions that don't work

So the issue today dealt with a page that uses jQuery to turn a selection box into a drop down multi select box. Check it out here it's a pretty nice plugin.
Anyway, I populate the page with my data, create the drop down and then when the drop down changes the page makes an Ajax request to reload the page with new data. The problem was that when the page reloaded the items in the drop down didn't work the same. each item consists of a label and a checkbox. The checkbox still worked fine the problem was that now if you clicked on the label it wouldn't select the checkbox. After some research I found there is a pretty common problem with Ajax and jQuery where the dynamically assigned functions stop working after an Ajax call. I set some break points in the javascript and verified that wasn't my problem, the functions to check the box when you click the label were still working. With some help from a co-worker we found that the plugin was creating a hidden div on the page and when I made the Ajax call that div was getting created a second, third fourth... time on the page. So a simple remove before making the Ajax call solved my problem and got the labels working again.

Character encoding, java, javascript and tomcat

Today my main issue has been with character encoding. This seems to pop up every couple of months and I either learn something new or deal with the same thing all over again. This time I learned a few things that were new.

The Setup: Users are allowed to type in custom tags for photos in the app I'm working on, so QA tested every character we might care about which revealed a few major problems. We allow the user to filter the photos by these tags. The filter sends the tags over a GET request to the server, the server parses the request and builds a new photos page with only those photos that match the selected tags.

The Issue: The app is older and foreign language support is new, so we constantly find places in the app where foreign characters don't work or cause strange problems. So when the javascript sent these foreign characters as a GET request they were getting converted to something other than UTF-8 when I tried to get them from the request as a parameter. 
When the request arrived at the server the characters would get converted wrong again by tomcat, and then when the information about a photo is retrieved from the database some of those foreign characters were HTML encoded before getting saved in the database.

The Solutions:
First off, I made sure each jsp contained the following line:
<%@ page contentType= "text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
This fixed the problem with the javascript sending the characters in the wrong format.
Second I made sure the Tomcat server.xml contained the following line:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
This didn't fix anything but was something I read should be done anyway to ensure we support UTF-8.
Third, in the java code I made sure to use StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml when retrieving the photo tags from the database.
Finally, I couldn't use the HttpServletRequest.getParameter function because tomcat was doing something to the strings before returning them. From what I read, step two above was supposed to help with that but isn't a guarantee. The best thing to do is use the getQueryString() function and decode the string yourself. So I did that and used URLDecoder.decode(string, "UTF-8") and finally got the tags from the GET request in the correct format.

These steps combined got the tags into a regular readable format instead of those annoying ? symbols. Once the tags were in the right format all my other code started working correctly.