Charset problem

[Christian Schröder]

Hi newgroup!
I have a question regarding character encoding which might be an Emacs 
problem or maybe a PuTTY problem or even a general linux problem. If you 
think my problem is not Emacs related, please let me know.
My problem is as follows: I log into my SuSE 10.2 linux server from my 
Windows box using PuTTY. I then use GNU Emacs (in text mode) to edit 
files on the linux box.
I have some old files which are encoded in ISO-8859-1. When I open these 
files in Emacs the german umlauts are displayed as question marks. I 
have tried to set PuTTY's translation to both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, but 
this doesn't change anything. When I set PuTTY's translation to 
ISO-8859-1 and *type* an umlaut, I see this umlaut only if it is 
lower-case, but it is followed by a blank. When I save the file and look 
at it using a hex editor the caracter is encoded in UTF-8. When I type 
an upper-case umlaut I see a question mark in Emacs and the hex editor 
shows a 0xC3 byte. When I set PuTTY's translation to UTF-8 and type an 
umlaut, I see a question mark, then some graphical character and a 
blank. In the hex editor I see a 3-byte sequence.
PuTTY seems to send an ISO-8859-1 encoded character when I set the 
translation to ISO-8859-1. At least it does in raw mode -- I have 
verified this using a network packet sniffer; unfortunately, I cannot 
look inside the SSH packets during the regular communication with the 
server.
So which way do my characters take before they get into the file? How 
many translation steps are done, and by whom? Are there any Emacs 
variables that must be set?

Thanks for any help!

Regards,
        Christian