Oops, I thought I had written that - must have accidentally deleted it. I'm on Windows 7, my locale is fr-CA / cp1252, and the non-ascii data (my name =) comes from my environment.

I discussed a bit with R. David Murray off-issue, and in the end it seems that it would be better to have subprocess accept parameters, but not do anything by default, and then have distutils pass these parameters.

Here is a new patch.