[Scribus] US keyboard with deadkeys problems

[Graham Monk]

I was going to respond to Ciro's mail above with a description
of inputting Spanish / French letters with accents and so on
using keyboard layout switching as I found this the easiest
way of achieving the result.
Before doing so I thought I should refresh my memory so
I had my descriptions clear, but I couldn't make it work in
Scribus or Kword. 
I went Googling to make sure I hadn't forgoten how and
came across several mentions of problems with deadkeys
in some programs because of qt immodules ( input methods
module )
I am not sure how to correct this, I am not much beyond
point and click myself. I am using SUSE 9.2 with KDE 3.3.2

Is there a simple way round this problem? I realize this is
not a Scribus problem but it does impact on it so I thought
it should be raised here.

Graham

P.S. Ironically, deadkeys *do* work in Kmail.
????