About the patch: """Break out of this dependency by assuming that the path to the encodings module is ASCII-only."""

The 'path' here is the entry inside the zip file (and does not include the location of the zip file itself), so the comment is right as long as the Python stdlib only contains ascii names.

But if the zip file contains the stdlib *and* some other custom modules with cp437 names, the whole operation will fail; it can be the case with py2exe applications.