Xorg 7.4 keyboard/terminal problem

[lhecking at users.sourceforge.net]

I wrote:
[...] 
>  Backtic, caret and tilde ` ^ ~ need two keypresses to appear.
>  Pressing the UK pound sign ? key onces creates a literal "\c2\a3".
>  Single and double quote ' " need two keypresses and they create a
>  literal "\c2\b4" and "\c2\a8", resp. (not sure about the exact hex
>  values as they are represented differently on the Linux system I'm
>  typing this on).
> 
>  FreeBSD 7.1, current ports, gnome 2.24.

 No takers, so here´s a bit more information:
 hal-0.5.11_21
 xorg-7.4
 xorg-server-1.5.3_7,1
 en_GB keyboard

 No xorg.conf file, no hal policies installed. All of `¨^ (back tic,
 double quotes, caret, single quotes, tilde) need two key presses to appear
 in a terminal. The same happens in vi except that double quotes creates
 \xc2\xa8, and single quote creates \xc2\xb, effectively rendering them
 useless. The UK pound sign works fine now £, and the output of
 setxkbmap -print is

xkb_keymap {
	xkb_keycodes  { include "xfree86+aliases(qwerty)"	};
	xkb_types     { include "complete"	};
	xkb_compat    { include "complete"	};
	xkb_symbols   { include "pc+gb(intl)"	};
	xkb_geometry  { include "pc(pc105)"	};
};

 Xorg.0.log records the keyboard as US, so I don´t understad how exactly
 hal and xorg interact here.

(**) AT Keyboard: always reports core events
(**) Option "Protocol" "standard"
(**) AT Keyboard: Protocol: standard
(**) Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"
(**) Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
(**) AT Keyboard: XkbRules: "xorg"
(**) Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
(**) AT Keyboard: XkbModel: "pc105"
(**) Option "XkbLayout" "us"
(**) AT Keyboard: XkbLayout: "us"
(**) Option "CustomKeycodes" "off"
(**) AT Keyboard: CustomKeycodes disabled

 How can I get the diacritics to work?