Querying special characters
If the collation of your database is set to accent insensitive, then this should work (for most accented characters).

For example in the collation Latin1_General_CI_AS, the CS means Case Insensitive, Accent Sensitive.  You would want the collation to be Latin1_General_CI_AI which means Case Insensitive, Accent Insensitive

Be warned though, that not all "accented" characters are created equally, but for spanish and french searches I found things work out as expected.