Spurious character in IOError exception

[loial]

When I correctly trap an IOError a spurious u' appears in the file
path in the exception message :

The path used in the code is correct i.e. /home/myfile

But the error message says :

[Errno 2] No such file or directory: u'/home/myfile'


I am simply doing

 except IOError, e:
            print str(e)


Any ideas where the 'u  is coming from?

This is python 2.4.1