Bug#370796: tetex: fails to hyphenize accented words (\hbox too wide)

[Pedro Celestino Reis Rodrigues <reis@fc.ul.pt>]

Package: tetex
Version: tetex-base
Severity: important
Tags: l10n

Using portuguese accents in latex input files, frequently, produces failure to hyphenize the accented words and results on oversized line lenghts on output. Every 
time a line lenght is oversized a diagnostic message like the following is produced
Overfull \hbox (8.95357pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 1161--1174

The same latex input file processed in a sarge box produces the correct output.
The problem seems related to UTF-8 encoding.
I'm quite sure the problem is easy to reproduce but in case an sample file is needed please let me know

Thanks

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-486
Locale: LANG=pt_PT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=pt_PT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)