keyboard issue

[pol]

Hi all,

I have just changed my keyboard layout from 'us' to 'italian'.
through the kde control panel. Yet accented characters are only displayed
in vim session; xterm and konsole session do not accept those chaarcters,
nothing is printed out. 
Lyx session prints empty squares.  
What is  wrong?

Also tried xkeycaps, no luck.
I am puzzled about which configuration files are actually used by ubuntu 


Thank you for your help 
--
Pol