Replying to my own post: while we haven't solved this, we have narrowed it down enough to make it a non-issue for us. Turns out that gnome-terminal from GNOME-1, at least under certain configurations, chokes on certain non-english characters (Euro, e's with accents, probably others), and rather than just not displaying them or showing them as question marks, it gets confused.
The problem appears to go away in GNOME 2, at least the terminals running on my own machine. So I think we're content to use xterm for pine until GNOME-2 makes it into the main distribution. Cheers, -mrj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]