I suspect many users are aware of incorrect presentation of watches while debugging (gcc).
Looks like output from gdb is misparsed - watches window, local variables / function arguments.
I think that when it comes to watching char typed variables (and struct members) gdb output contains the ascii character corresponding to var's value and C::B has trouble parsing such string.
(EDIT)
for now I use "set output-radix 16" gdb initialization command to force more clean gdb output for "info locals" and such.