UTF-8 editing problems with GEdit

[Paul M. Bucalo]

I have been experiencing a problem with editing XML files using GEdit in
FC1. I'm hoping someone will know what is happening and point me to the
solution, or tell me what I need to do. I have done some research on
this, but without knowing what is wrong, I haven't been successful in
figuring this out...

I am trying to edit XFce-4's menu file, 'menu.xml', using GEdit. The
file has to be in UTF-8 code to be picked up by xfdesktop. If I run a
menu generator, MenuMaker, and open it with GEdit and then open the
"Save As" dialog box, I see that it displays the file as "UTF-8".
However, once edited and saved, subsequent openings in GEdit display
"Current Locale (UTF-8)" instead. Once the file has been saved after
editing, the menu is often useless, thereafter.

To be sure to remove the possibility of an error in xml coding as the
problem, I copied and pasted a current menu branch to form a duplicate
entry. After saved, the menu came up. I went back in and edited the
duplicates to make them point to the RH-specific system utilities that
aren't picked up by MenuMaker, saved, and now it won't come up. I
checked them very carefully for errors. There's very little tag work
involved. It doesn't look like that is the problem. The only way I have
been able to restore the menu's function is to generate another one
through MenuMaker.

Locale is set as:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

I can't see where there is a problem here, but I really don't know. 
If anyone wants to 'menu.xml', I can send it to them privately. It may
be a bit too hefty to post here. I still suspect that it is a
system-wide issue or one with GEdit. 

Any ideas? Any suggestions? 

Thanks,

Paul