Special (accent) Characters Problem in KDE 3.3

In the recent past (few days ago) I upgraded kde 3.2 to kde 3.3 using apt-get in my SuSE 9.1 distribution. I have a problem with special(accent) characters in some applications like kmail, konsole, kile; the accent characters appears as squares instead of letters. As recommended, I have (re)-installed the kde base packages and the qt libraries, but that does not resolve the problem. What can I do? Thanks in advance. Gustavo Adolfo