With the current installation, phpMyadmin gives the following error:
Notice: Undefined index: UTF-8 in e:\instantrails\phpmyadmin\libraries\database_interface.lib.php on line 165

You can easily reproduce this error by selecting "Japanese (ja-utf-8)" as the language in phpMyAdmin.

This can be fixed by opening: your-install-path\InstantRails\phpmyadmin\lang\japanese-utf-8.inc.php
And changing the line:
$charset = 'UTF-8';
to
$charset = 'utf-8';

Just thought I'd let you know so I don't have to fix this everytime I install.

Thanks