Just relying a discussion open on comp.lang.python,
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/771aa9081ad6584c#

1) Windows 7, open PowerShell
2) Change code page to cp65001
3) Launch Python3.1.2 or Python3.2.rc1 -> crash

Key points:
- The fact that Python does not recognize cp65001 is "ok".
- The Python crash is unexpected.

Probably a legitimate "crash" (aka deliberate abort), since Python needs an encoding for its standard input/output text streams, and the encoding suggested by the system ("cp65001") isn't supported.

> PS D:\jm> chcp 65001 
> Page de codes active : 65001 

Please don't do that: it is useless (it doesn't help to display or read more unicode characters) and it breaks Windows console: see issue #1602 (especially msg120414 and msg126303), and maybe also issue #6058.

If the "crash" is the following message, this issue is a duplicate of  #6058.
---
PS D:\jm> c:\python31\python.exe 
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: can't initialize sys standard 
streams 
LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001
---
It is not a crash: Python has no codec for the code page 65001, that's all. I closed #6058 because cp65001 cannot be set as an alias to utf-8. Anyway, use 65001 as console encoding is not a good idea. I close this issue: see #1602 for more information.

I added a cp65001 codec to Python 3.3: see issue #13216. So Python will not "crash" anymore if the console code page is set to cp65001.