The reason I am running nsd76 is because it handles European characters without bigger hassle... When I switch to nsd8x special characters get corrupted. Yesterday I posted a question about howto get nsd8x ready for international characters. Switching to nsd8x will probably be better than rewriting the cms...
https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00044O
I already tried it once but it somehow didn't turn out and thought that I wouldn't really need it! But things changed with the cms :(