In order to fix some of the server-side issues in 1.9.0, we will be doing a rolling grid update beginning at 8am PT/SLT on Sunday, March 19, 2006. Each region will be restarted once. We will send an alert message to each region one minute before it is restarted to give folks time to move to another area temporarily. Any one remaining in the region during restart will need to wait a minute or two and then login again.
The main fix in the new release will be the proper handling of Unicode characters in IM. This resolves the bug where IMs containing Unicode are sent to email instead of to one's conversation partner(s).
A viewer update is also in the works to address additional client-side issues. More on that when it's ready to be released, most likely Monday or Tuesday.