getting comfortable again after upgrade to emacs 21

[cloos@jhcloos.com (James H. Cloos Jr.)]

While in the process of getting a new box up -- and getting gnus setup
w/o reference to my previous, temporarily unaccessible,  configuration
-- I've run into some gotchas I've not found fixes for.

I'm probably missing something obvious, but I've been stuck w/o gnus
for a few months now and things are a bit hazy. :(

The two most noticible problems are keeping the current article's
summary line in the middle of the summary buffer window when summary
and article are both displayed, and dealing w/ non 7-bit ASCII
characters.

I've tried this for the former:

(custom-set-variables
 '(scroll-down-aggressively t)
 '(scroll-margin 3)
 '(scroll-step 0)
 '(scroll-up-aggressively t)
 )

Looked right from the docs but doesn't get it done.  It is at least a
step in the right direction as scrolling when it does happen moves the
current article's line back to centre, but I want it always centred.

The character display symptom is that 8bit characters display as
{digraphs} in the article buffer and as ? in the summary buffer.  But
they display as they should in the article buffer after a C-ug....

I'm sure there is a coding-system related option I'm missing here, but
I'm not having any luck figuring it out.

(I do have a cvs co, but haven't installed it into 21.1 yet....)

-JimC