Looks good and the "patched" patch also works in a py3k installer build.

BTW, Mark, I was curious as to why you were unable to reproduce the 
problem with your own build.  I should have mentioned that my testing 
was with complete installer (framework) builds.  I subsequently 
experimented with a non-framework build and found that I could not 
reproduce the problem running from the ./python in the build directory.  
Stepping through gdb showed that, during the calls from create_stdio, 
the import of locale fails in textio.c, so it falls back to using 
"ascii" as the default encoding (~line 899) and avoids the crash.  If I 
do a make install, the unpatched installed bin/python3 does crash in the 
same way as with the installer python3.