I new that it was something wrong with emacs that made it not accept meta
keystrokes, so I was about to send a question to this group when I did a
last-ditch search of the function list (C-hf?) and found set-input-mode.
It turns out that on some systems, emacs defaults to ditching the 8th bit of
input characters.  You can fix it by including (set-input-mode t nil t) in
your .emacs file.

If the first parameter is nil, it means that emacs should use CBREAK input 
mode, otherwise it should use INTERRUPT mode.  The second parameter means 
accept the ^S/^Q characters as flow-control if non-nil.  The third parameter 
means ignore the 8th bit of input characters if nil.

Hope I helped somebody!

 _______________________________________________________________________ 
|                                                                       |
|  -=*Alastair Irvine*=-    Curtin University Computer Science Student  |
|  Magic:tG player, RPGer, extreme net-nut  | e-mail: eirvine@#  or...  |
|  WWW page: http://student.#/~eirvine/   | alastair@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au  |
|  finger irvineaj@anger.cs.#  _______________________ | irvineaj@cs.#  |
|_____________________________| # means curtin.edu.au |_________________|