mkdtemp fails miserably on Windows if Windows user name has any non-ASCII characters, like ä or ö, in it. mkdtemp throws an encoding error.

This seems to be because the default temp dir in Windows is "c:\documents and settings\<user name>\local settings\temp". Now if the user name has non-ASCII characters ASCII decoder cannot handle it and creating temp directories won't work.

As a work around I have used the following code:

tempdir = unicode(tempfile.gettempdir(), 'mbcs')
mkdtemp(suffix='foo', dir=tempdir)

This applies for both Python 2.4 and Python 2.5.