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maybe related to #6501
Vista 32-bit SP1, Python 3.1:
"""
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
D:\>chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001
D:\>python -c 'print("")'
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: can't initialize sys standard streams
LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual
way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
D:\>python
Python 3.1.1 (r311:74483, Aug 17 2009, 17:02:12) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
"""
Expected, either:
1. print nothing (""), or
2. python exception about unknown encoding, or
3. python exception about cannot encode to the encoding
cp65001 is supposed to be an alias for utf-8. Because of the error,
there is AFAICT no way to set the command prompt to accept utf-8 output
even for pipe redirection.
A workaround is to use sys.stdout.buffer.write() to write raw byte
strings, encoding manually. But this takes us back to python 2.

there's a patch proposed to add cp65001 alias: issue6058 

Thank you for your report.
See #6501 about the Fatal Error
See #6058 for the feature request (cp65001 on windows).

I added a cp65001 codec to Python 3.3: see issue #13216. So Python will not "crash" anymore if the console code page is set to cp65001.