For what it's worth, my solution was different than what everyone else on these boards has ever told me.
In fact, even this site (openacs.org) seems to be doing it wrong because this particular message is being sent to me iso-8859-1 encoded. It should be encoded utf-8 so that all the characters display properly.
As a test, if you're using IE, you can go to View | Encoding and play around a bit and see if the characters don't clear up.
Anyway, what I've found is that you have to set the encoding to UTF-8, and then the characters display properly.
What I've done in my nsd.tcl file is:
ns_param HackContentType 1
ns_param URLCharset "utf-8"
ns_param OutputCharset "utf-8"
ns_param HttpOpenCharset "utf-8"
I also changed several functions in ad-utilities.tcl.preload, particularly ReturnHeaders, ad_return_top_of_page, and all the other ReturnHeaders* functions to show:
Content-Type: $content_type; charset=utf-8
Then everything worked nicely. I suppose you have to have multibyte support compiled into PG, but based on some simple testing on my computer (I don't remember if I enabled multibyte support -- my databases are of type SQL_ASCII), and everything works just fine.
I hope this helps the people out there who are having troubles...
