I suspect this is really a problem in my system configuration or not understanding how wide characters are supposed to work. (Perhaps a problem in the upgrade from 6.2 to 7.0). But, if I run the command "man man" everything works fine - I get the man page. If I run "man man | col", I get the first few lines of the man page, then: Error executing formatting or display command. System command (cd /usr/share/man ; (echo -e ".pl 11i"; /bin/gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz) | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/groff -Tlatin1 -mandoc | /usr/bin/less -isr) exited with status 141. It looks like "col" is treating the first character with ASCII value greater than 128 as the WEOF character and exiting.
Works for me (col from util-linux-2.10m-12, man-1.5h1-10). Feel free to re-open this if you have further information that can help reproducing this.