Hello!

When I launch GNU Emacs in an ISO Latin environment (env  
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO8859-15 LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-15 /usr/local/bin/ 
emacs-23.1.50 -Q &) and display in dired a directory with entries  
from some month of March the "Mär" abbrevation for the German month  
name "März" is displayed as M\344r. C-u C-x = on this \344 reveals:

	        character: \344 (4194276, #o17777744, #x3fffe4)
	preferred charset: eight-bit (Raw bytes 128-255)
	       code point: 0xE4
	           syntax: w 	which means: word
	      buffer code: #xE4
	        file code: not encodable by coding system iso-latin-9-unix
	          display: no font available

The dired buffer has a 0 as encoding indicator. In ISO Latin 1 or 15  
encodings LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS is \344 = 228 = 0xE4 = U 
+00E4 a valid character and not some raw "eight-bit" entity. Could be  
this prevents proper display: