The new version is very much improved, and now almost as rich as V1.98.2 thanks for this good job !
There is though a problem of french characters. It seems to affects only (?) IPTC metadata

This screenshot shows that "chène près du belvédère de Côte Rouge."
is displayed as "chne prs du belvdre de Cte Rouge" , which is more compact

This screen is different, with all characters OK (but shows a problem of refresh: recent subdirectory "conv" absent from tree panel, despite several "refresh" commands")

Accented characters are ok in fields other than IPTC , such as directory path or "info" used in full screen display, as long as this "info" is not extracted from Iptc fields, as you can see in this small crop from a full screen display of a picture:

corresponding to this option :

My config : Ubuntu 10.04-LTS_64bits / Asus AMD-64_singlecore