Disabling Pango in GTK

["Granitslab" <info granitslab com>]

Hi, I'm working on a prog for my boss, and thought of GTK+ for my interface.
it is, basically, a remake of an old DOS facturing application, which source
code I do not have, to win32

Target language : pure C,
Target platform : win32 only
Target language : French

and as soon as I define a label with its text containing accented characters
(é, À, è, etc.),
Pango refuses to render it.
I'd like to be able to use plain ASCII with GTK+, 1) because of this problem
2) Because Pango's rendering is very slow. I know x-chat2 uses gtk2, and
SETting a var in autoexec disables it, but that's not such a nice way,
especially since this app will be on a server, and accessed by many
computers. I don't want to have to add that in every Autoexec, especially
since 1) they are not computer wizards (barely made it out of DOS) and 2)
this is an apprenticing, and I'll be out of there by mid-may.

Or, maybe, could you point me out to another GUI-making api like GTK+, maybe
simply restricted to windows, with pure C programmation and
non-lame-programmation-structure (GTK, for instance, is non-lame. I *might*
use the win32 api, but I'm kinda afraid that one will be something ugly to
deal with.)