The thing is, that under windows most of the fonts are Windows based, not DOS ANSI (which has the classic box-drawing symbols used often in BBS days). Under windows most of the fonts default to characters based on the windows locale,
ie:
176-178 = degree symbol, plus-minus, squared
degree, plusminus, I
-, A, I
and 219-223 are
U", U',Y', Thron, and Sharp S on most regions
but for people outside of US-English it does alter.
and even with MS-DOS ANSI character sets, all the characters don7t even match up between US DOs, and Western European DOS (full box, lower box, |, I` upper box)
Not much you can do about fonts showing the same characters for character codes 128-255 for everyone unless you restrict people from changing fonts away from a single standard. (or implement Unicode proper, which isn't easily done)
And if I am not mistaken, the current ANSI standard (and it is only valid in the US) does not include box drawing anymore for characters in the 178-223 range, but the range of accented letters which is now Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), and windows uses ISO-8859-2 thru -11 for various localised versions of Windows
