JDBC Encoding conversion bug

Hi,

I just upgraded my database to PG 7.3.4 from 7.2.1 yesterday ...
However, I hit a pretty critical snag with the JDBC driver ... I have my
DB encoding as SQL_ASCII and I have a significant amount of data that
uses the full 8 bits (ñ, è, etc...) ... Prior to 7.3 and the new JDBC
driver that comes with it (pg73jdbc2.jar), this data was not a problem
... However, I am now receiving the following whenever a column is
retrieved that contains a high ASCII value character:

Invalid character data was found. This is most likely caused by stored
data containing characters that are invalid for the character set the
database was created in. The most common example of this is storing
8bit data in a SQL_ASCII database.

Now, I was under the assumption that ASCII is 8 bits ... At least,
according to my little ASCII chart, there are 256 characters listed ...
And the fact that the PG back-end supports 8 bit characters when the
encoding is SQL_ASCII seems to confirm this ... So, in my opinion, this
is a bug in the JDBC driver ... So what's up with this exception and
error message?

Also, I have compiled the JDBC driver code from postgres-7.3.4.tar.gz
and manually traced through it in my debugger ... The driver is
hard-coded to use UTF-8 for PG 7.3 back ends ... It won't even honor the
charSet parameter on the JDBC URL if I were to pass it .. Lines 373 to
376 of AbstractJdbc1Connection.java prove this ...

I am pretty stuck at this point ... What can I do? ... Recreating the
database with a different encoding is _NOT_ an option ... the DB is over
5GB and takes over 4 hours to do a Backup/Restore .. I compiled PG 7.3.4
from source and didn't pass any flags to the configure script ... The
back end is running on RedHat 7.1

Lastly, I'm running JDK 1.3.1 on my client machines ... I could
potentially upgrade to JDK 1.4 but I'd prefer not to since it would
require a fair amount of regression testing since this is a production
application ..

Thanks in advance,

Dave