On Windows, using zipimport module APIs like get_filename on a file with non-ascii characters in the full path fails with 

UnicodeEncodeError: 'mbcs' codec can't encode characters in position 0--1: invalid character ( Full output attached in errorlog.txt ).

The issue is that Modules/zipimport.c has a function compile_source which tries to run PyUnicode_EncodeFSDefault on the pathname. On Windows, the default encoding is 'mbcs' which cannot handle unicode characters.

This has already been fixed in the import machinery on python 3 ( see issue http://bugs.python.org/issue13758, http://bugs.python.org/issue11619). The solution is to pass the pathname as Unicode directly to the compiler.