I had this problem (and I was the one that posted it 3 weeks ago -- see this post: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg34837.html). It was with Mandrake 10.0 Official and KDE's own Mandrake RPM. Some apps had the problem, other not. For example, no dead keys accent with LyX, Scribus and Kwriter but no problem with OpenOffice.org, Kspread or Kate.
I went back to KDE 3.2 on Mandrake. But I tried the move to KDE 3.3 on Slackware 10 (tgz packages) and everything went fine, the dead keys are doing their job on my ca_enhanced keyboard (French Canadian). So? Problems with Mandrake and Suse? R. Ouellette -- Édité et transmis avec des logiciels libres sous Linux !