We're encountering this issue in another application of ours. A scan of the code doesn't reveal any places where the encodings.* modules are removed, so I've created a wrapper I intend to apply to our application that might help us detect where the module is being deleted. I'm attaching it as 'wrapper.py'. It appears to work for the nominal case. I'll report back if it works (or doesn't) for a real-world case.