order by a string

hi!

i am developing with version 7.3.2 under cygwin. my production
evironment is 7.3.3 on a suse machine.
language settings (lc_...) for the server are on developing and
production machine the same, 'C'.
now i encoutered the following behaviour. i use a union select to unify
a query result with an ' (all)' entry.
i used at home a space on first character to ensure this entry will be
on top if i am ordering by the column.
it works in developing environment but it doesnt in production. in
production i got a ordering result wich ignores special chars like my
whitespace and the '(' and the all entry so comes for example after
'akk' and before 'amm'.
i dont want to have it this way!
did i miss any setting option to change this behaviour?
or do i need something like a workaround (adding another column, for
axample adding values like 0 for my special entrys and 1 for all others
so i can sort by this solumn too, to get my result?)

thanx for your help
stefan