I've complied a new version of VDR.  Am running FC3 and executed the following just as a test :
 
[root@nzbaxters vdr-1.3.21test]# cat $LANG
en_GB.iso8859-1
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1
export LC_CTYPE="en_GB@euro"
ulimit -Sc1000000000
 ./vdr
vdr: please turn off UTF-8 before starting VDR
Is UTF-8 being referenced somewhere else?