Bug#341686: solved

[Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl>]

Following your suggestion I did xrdb -q; the result was

jws@vega:~$ xrdb -q
*customization: -color
xterm*VT100*background:  white
xterm*VT100*cursorColor: red
xterm*VT100*font:  -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*font2: -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*font3: -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*font4: -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*font5: -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*font6: -efont-fixed-medium-r-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
xterm*VT100*foreground: black
xterm*VT100*utf8:

Apart from the first line, this is what I put in my ~/.Xresources file 
ages ago. Notice there is a line xterm*VT100*utf8. I had put this in 
because I thought it was necessary (and maybe it used to be in the 
past). Anyway it did not hurt with xterm 200.

But then I commented it out, installed xterm 204, and restarted X.
And now lo and behold! xterm is 'hard-wired' to UTF-8 mode (with 
right-clicking you cannot switch it off), and creating a new xterm with 
xterm +u8 produces an xterm which displays Latin-1, and which can be 
switched to UTF-8 manually. This is what Thomas Wolff wanted, I assume.

Regards, Jan