Thanks to Todd for setting me on the right path to fixing my codepage problem. With his hint I found an O'Reilly chapter that contains docs to get Samba to translate between Windows codepages and something sensible. (As long as by "sensible" you don't mean UTF-8). The magic is in the smb.conf:
[global]
  client code page = 437
  character set = ISO8859-1
Props to O'Reilly for putting the whole book online.
techbad
  2003-05-12 15:19 Z