Yes, although I think that wasn't the case with Win16 and there are still some situations in which you have to deal with the differences. Copying a file from the console on Windows 95 to a FAT volume appears to allow use of the OEM character set with no conversion.
BTW, MS's use of code pages is full of shit. Yesterday I was spell-checking a document that had the name Andre in it (the accent was missing). The popup menu suggested Andr* where the * was an upper case slashed O. I first thought this was because the menu character set might be using a different code page, but no -- it must have been bad in the database, because selecting that entry from the menu actually inserted the slashed O character. So they must have been maintaining their database with a different code page. Just to indicate that when we sort out the rest of the Unicode debate (which I'm sure we will :-) there will still be surprises on Windows... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)