the unicode saga continues...

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Can anybody clue me in to what's going on here?

It's as Mark says: the console encoding is cp437 on your system,
cp1252.

Windows has *two* default code pages at any point in time: the
OEM code page, and the ANSI code page. Either one depends on the
Windows release (Western, Japanese, etc.), and can be set by the
administrator. The OEM code page is primarily used for the console
(and then also as the encoding on the FAT filesystem); the ANSI
code page is used in all other places (that don't use Unicode APIs).

In addition, the console code page may deviate from the OEM code
page, if you run chcp.exe.

Regards,
Martin