When using unicode arguments for distutils.core.setup() 
running setup.py breaks with the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
...
\Lib\distutils\command\sdist.py", line 430, in 
make_release_tree
    self.distribution.metadata.write_pkg_info(base_dir)
  File "C:\Programme\Python24\Lib\distutils\dist.py", line 
1047, in write_pkg_info
    pkg_info.write('Author: %s\n' % self.get_contact() )
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode 
character u'\xf6' in position 16: ordinal not in range(128)

Changing the system default encoding to iso-8859-1 
works around this problem.