ncurses apps (such as yast) on a serial console

Hi all, I've got some servers hooked up to a console server. They now have a serial console which is working great, except for one detail: curses apps, such as yast, seem to suffer from some UTF8/latin1 conversions. My setup is: suse 9.2 workstation, suse 9.2 console server running minicom, suse 9.2 server with nullmodem attached. $TERM is set to vt102, minicom is also in vt102 mode. minicom itself runs with a $LANG=en_US.UTF-8. as is the konsole I'm starting the ssh session to the console server in. $LANG is not set in the shell I log into via the serial console. Setting it to en_US.UTF-8 makes no difference. Any clue on how I can make this work? -- Erik Hensema (erik@hensema.net)