ok, now it works (tm)
you are probably right, but playing around with charsets is (at last for me) a nightmare..
I tried the fix in the common.php (which is actually in extern.php?!), but this didn't the trick. I've never modified any language file, neither have installed any mod (this was the first and fresh install..). I guess an error occured during upload..
however, I reinstalled in a parent directory and it now works great
I had to copy the example_config.php and edit it, so vi would use the original charset. and it worked flawlessly..
Thanks a lot for the quick and authoritative answer, gentlemen.
--
grandpas