As I am being forced to work in Windows again (man I miss virtual desktops!), I of course ran into problems with accented characters again (in mutt — I do get some mails in French :). Turns out that this time it was solved by telling PuTTy to translate as ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe). I’m pretty sure the world out there knew that already, but I didn’t :)
For the record, my shell is set to en_US.UTF8 (but setting PuTTy to UTF8 messes things up — don’t you just love consistency? :).