My problem is solved. I'm using now unicode(some_string, "latin-1").encode("utf-16-le") or unicode(some_string, "unicode-escape").encode("utf-16-le") to pack "unicode strings" (not sure about the terminology) into my structures. It seems PEP100 and the unicode standard (link in PEP 100) should be required reading for everyone using unicode. Thanks again, MaL, Martin, /F. Thomas