pgaccess error message

Hello,

I recently compiled from source pg 7.2.1. Version information is

gds=# select version();
version
--------------------------------------------------------------
PostgreSQL 7.2.1 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC 3.0.4

All is well with the database proper and psql, and I have loaded several
million records with no problems. My one problem relates to pgaccess. I have
not previously tried to use it (I was on pg 6.5), so I wanted to see what it
was like. When I try to open my db (local machine), I receive the following
message:

Error trying to connect to database 'gds' on host localhost

PostgreSQL error message:Connection to database failed
ERROR: Client encoding UNICODE is not supported

That last bit is very strange. Everything is English; no locale or multibyte
or such things. At this time, I have taken all defaults for the *.conf files,
and the user is pg superuser.

Help! Obviously not urgent, but now I'm curious.

Thank you.

Don