http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-December/041488.html I just had this happen again, and I figured out what I did wrong. I actually typed "--enable-unicode=usc4". Must have been all that recent US college football on the brain! The typo in the option wreaks havoc, but fixing that to ucs4 naturally works correctly. I'm not sure there's anything worth changing, but at least now it's in the archives. -Barry