> Things work fine for other characters (a^, o^, etc) just not 
> w^. What is so special about this character ?

The fact that it's not in the iso-8859-1 subset of Unicode. (iso-8859-1 is
the "Western European" character repertoire, w^ is needed only for languages
like Welsh and Irish Gaelic that are considered too far West to qualify...).

Michael Kay