OK, I've found out the bug, it is inside kio_man. It affects only distributions which do NOT use mandb, like RHEL. It is originating in an Ubuntu-provided patch: http://old.nabble.com/Bug-449554%3A-konqueror%3A-Recode-manual-pages-to-UTF-8-td15409333.html I've reverted the faulty patch and created TDE bug 714: http://bugs.trinitydesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714 It has solved the problem on RHEL 5 and RHEL 6. I will upload the new RHEL kdebase packages soon (3.5.13-9). Francois Andriot