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Idle from 2.5rc1 (svn today) produces a different result
than console (with my default, utf-8, encoding):

IDLE 1.2c1      
>>> print "á"
á
>>> print len("á")
2
>>> print "á".upper()
á
>>> str("á")
'\xc3\xa1'
>>> print u"á"
á
>>> print len(u"á")
2
>>> print u"á".upper()
á
>>> str(u"á")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#7>", line 1, in <module>
    str(u"á")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in
position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)

Again, IDLE 1.1.3 (python 2.4.3) produces a different result:

IDLE 1.1.3      
>>> print "á"
á
>>> print len("á")
2
>>> print "á".upper()
á
>>> str("á")
'\xc3\xa1'
>>> print u"á"
á
>>> print len(u"á")
2
>>> print u"á".upper()
á
>>> str(u"á")
'\xc3\x83\xc2\xa1'
>>> 


I'd say idle is broken, as it is not able to respect utf-8
for print (or even len) of unicode strings.

OTOH, with some tricks I can manage to get an accented a in
a unicode in idle:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> print unicodedata.lookup("LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE")
á
>>> print len(unicodedata.lookup("LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH
ACUTE"))
1