Unable to automount NTFS volume or read UTF-8 filenames

I recently tried mounting my first NTFS FireWire drive under OS X, and
have been less than thrilled with the results. Two problems have come
up, the second one being more critical:

1. The single volume on the 160 GB drive does not automatically mount
on my desktop when I plug in the drive. Disk Utility sees the
volume, although it only identifies it by its device name (e.g.
"disk3s1"), and refuses to mount it. I can get around this problem
with "mount -r -t ntfs /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/NTFS_Volume" to
manually mount it on /Volumes/NTFS_Volume. (Restarting the Finder
seems necessary to get it to pick up on the new volume.) But it
bothers me that friends seem able to automatically mount their NTFS
volumes without any problems. Makes me wonder if this drive might
be set up a little strangely. (It was originally formatted under
either Windows 2000 or Windows XP.)

2. After mounting the volume, UTF-8 (Unicode) filenames aren't
displaying correctly. It appears that the default translation is
for ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1). I'm quite certain that the Windows system
that created this volume to begin with was using Unicode. For
example, a file named "Leo_Jardim_Botânico.jpg" shows up in "ls" this
way in a Terminal.app window that's using UTF-8 character display:

$ ls -B Leo_*
Leo_Jardim_Bot\342nico.jpg

Octal 0342 is 0xE2, or "â" ("a" with a circumflex, if you're doing
ASCII-only) in ISO 8859-1. But it wouldn't be a proper UTF-8
sequence the way the Finder wants it. In fact, if I open up the
containing folder in the Finder, here's what the same filename
appears as:

Leo_Jardim_Bot?

That's not a substitution for a non-printable character. It's a
literal question mark. And it's the last character in the filename.
And no application can open it that way.

I'd be okay with manual mounting, as I've never needed to work with an
NTFS disk before. But the Unicode filename thing is a show-stopper for
me. The mount_ntfs command has a "-W" option which, according to the
manual page, might fix the problem. But instead of explaining how to
use the arguments to -W, it simply refers the reader to the man page for
mount_msdosfs(8), which doesn't exist.

Any suggestions? I'd rather not have to re-attach this hard drive to a
Windows box and zip the files -- I already feel so dirty...