Why does Joomla! 1.5 use UTF-8 encoding?
Well... how about never needing to mess with encoding settings again?
Ever needed to display several languages on one page or site and something always came up in Giberish?
With utf-8 (a variant of Unicode) glyphs (character forms) of basically all languages can be displayed with one single encoding setting.
Inactive Modules
You should publish modules to the "inactive" position and set the Menus to "All", for them to show up on pages where there is no active menu ID. This is a bug/feature of Joomla that causes only menu items in the "All" setting to show up.