At a guess I'd say that your LANG setting includes a '.uft8' at the end, and that you're running perl-5.8.0. In that case, perl unfortunately concludes that all its input is utf-8 encoded, and characters in the range 128-255 get generally screwed up. If this is the case, either upgrade to a newer perl release, or remove the .utf8 suffix from $LANG.

Dave.