keyboard encoding

[cp]

I am using RH8.0
Does anyone have any clever ideas why the � character has to be pushed twice before
it will display. Also if I view text file with a hex editor it gets stored as 2 hex values
0xc2 and 0xa8 instead of just 0x22 ( rather annoying as gcc will not comple progams
I have written )
Have tried a few different keyboard setting settings with no luck.
Under Mandrake 9.0 the character gets stored as 0x22 as I would expect.

Clever ideas most welcome
TIA
Col.