An additional side note: I'm not realy sure, but part of the original 
irritation leading to that PR came from setting 

  LC_CTYPE=ISO8859-1

instead of de_DE.ISO8859-1.

I'm not sure this is a valid locale, but it worked for 1.5.x.

Another data point: gdm (the gnome xdm replacement) or some other part of
gnome more or less force you to select a language and encode that in LANG.

I have "unsetenv LANG" in my gnomerc scripts now.

Martin