playing a bit more with tcsh and locale showed a few more issues

1) your tcsh login *.csh(rc) scripts reset locale for every subshell
which IMHO is wrong.  pls compare (running in bash, typos are mine): 

setup:
  $ locale | grep CTYPE
  LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

bash is ok:
  $ LC_CTYPE=de_DE bash -c locale | grep CTYPE
  LC_CTYPE=de_DE

tcsh breaks env settings:
  $ LC_CTYPE=de_DE tcsh -c locale | grep CTYPE
  LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

2) /etc/csh.cshrc shouldn't explicitly set "dspmbyte" directly (or only for
known bugs in tcsh), tcsh should do this itself. e.g. tcsh-6.12 had bugs for
*.UTF-8 (*.utf8 did work) but that's fixed in tcsh-6.14 and should never be a
reason for the code in csh.cshrc .


3) your tcsh cshrc setup is awful, it sources way too many files
and (re)sets to mcuh stuff for every subshell (yes I know "tcsh -f").

compare

  $ time strace -e open -o O-bash bash -c exit
  $ time strace -e open -o O-tcsh tcsh -c exit
  $ grep -c -v /dev/null O-??sh

you tcsh subshell startup time drives me mad on slow computers
(e.g. qemu on AMD64 3200+ or my 600 MHz notebook;)

  $ time bash -c exit

takes ~0.05 sec. real time in qemu, while

  $ time tcsh -c exit

takes ~1.2 secs real time !!


not that I like tcsh too much these days (oh yes I did -- but ages ago;) but
this tcsh setup really sucks...