Problem with accented characters

[Neilen Marais]

Hi

I'm running Hoary. I enabled the compose key in gnome to get accented
characters. I use them on IRC using xchat, but the other IRCers claim
they can't see my accented characters. However, I can see theirs, mine
look fine locally, and if they cut-n-paste the garbled characters it
again looks fine on my side. 

Perhaps I can reproduce the problem here:

e with ^ : ê
e with " : ë

Help appreciated!

Thanks
Neilen