Version: (using KDE KDE 3.4.1) Installed from: Slackware Packages Some places in kde lower case ä (a with umlauts) is replaced by an empty square. One such place is the k-menu (menu bar in application windows' shows it ok tho). It seems not to be a font missing this glyph, like i said it shows ok in some places. It's most likely not a packaging buck either cause after installing a Slackware package for i18n-fi I also tried to build it by myself with the same results.
Known bug. desktop_kdebase had incorrect UTF8 code for letter ä for some reason. Probably bug in some tools UTF8 handling at some point. All .desktop files that contain letter ä are broken. Has been fixed in svn for some days, and 3.4.2 will contain the fix.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94836 I created a ruby script to fix the corrupted files on Gentoo.