I don't quite follow this. Maybe I didn't explain my case right. It
should be impossible (as I understand it) to create a file with
iso-8859-1 pound signs in it if everything is set up correctly for
utf-8 shouldn't it? I just happened to have some iso-8859-1 pounds in
a file I had created earlier.
When I edited the file with the iso-8859-1 pound signs (just 0xA3
bytes by themselves) I got the incorrect cursor positioning. These are
invalid characters in utf-8 and, I believe, vile should really display
the 'invalid character' glyph which on my system appears to be an
inverse question mark.