Sometime between yesterday and today queries in the form of
"select * from t where t.f like 'k%'" have been broken so that they
never use the index (on win32, not sure about others).
On win32, at least, they have been broken for a while but this was due
to a known issue based on the locales. AFAICT, the current cvs has
addressed this issue and (show lc_collate returns C) there seems to be
no reason why the queries aren't working properly.
Merlin