JDBC encoding

I experienced the same problems as you with spezial german characters
called 'Umlaute'. Everything worked fine with postgres7.1 and JDBC using
"sql-ascii".
After changing to postgres 7.3 setting of driver option 'charset=LATIN1'
had no effect.
Reading the thread helped me a lot to understand the problem. My
workaround for now:
I dumped the database (with pg_dump, not pg_dumpall) to a file, then
dropped the database and createdan empty one with the former name  by
sql-command with encoding = LATIN1. After restoring the data into the
database by copy from dump I really had both: Access from JAVA as well
as ODBC both with correctly shwn characters.
Time needed for that operation about 2 minutes. If you are in a hurry
this might be a quick solution.

Bye
rohano