Well, as far as I can tell, it *should* not have been necessary, so it sounds like you have jumped at a bug with respect to MHonArc's ability to either save some resource setting needed for UTF-8, or retrieve it when running MHonArc without the -rcfile option. Something for Earl to look into, I suppose.
I believe it would be useful if you let Earl know which MHonArc version you are running.