Also note that there were major internal changes in Python strings for 3.3 (http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/) so you might want to look at those especially if this worked OK with Python 3.2.  Since it seems unlikely that there would be any further progress on resolving this without more analysis on the UNO end, I am closing this issue as presumed to be a third-party problem.  Feel free to re-open if evidence of a problem in Python itself is uncovered.