WTFont -- or who broke multi-byte support in XMMS?(And how?)

I just can't get to the bottom of this. If I open an ogg on my Knoppix/Debian drive from my SuSE drive, XMMS displays accented characters perfectly. In Knoppix/Debian with the same settings in XMMS, and the same font, the only accent I can see is i with an umlaut! There is no ç à and so on. The characters with ç and à are simply missed out.

I've upgraded XMMS, played about with dfontmgr (sorry, I really can't understand the man page and I don't know what controls which fonts are available to XMMS anyway) all to no avail. It's really begining to annoy me. I suspect that there's some script somewhere controlling this, but where?
:twisted:

Edited: must have been really tired -- I put Gentoo where I meant Debian/Knoppix! :(