Terry: Thanks for the hint
In a pure ascii path I created files very similar to yours with Swedish "ä" instead of your katakana character.
I also got the same result.

a.py:
print ('something')

ä.py:
print ('other')

c.py:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import a
import ä

I ran the files with 3.2b2:
    
c:\Python32\python.exe a.py
something

c:\Python32\python.exe ä.py
other

c:\Python32\python.exe c.py
something
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c.py", line 3, in <module>
    import ä
ImportError: No module name ä


Victor: How do I determine what code page my old w2k is using?.
Would that be 8859-1 or some older variant for western Europe or Sweden?