It seems Suse has shipped a buggy build of Python in 9.2. That appears to lead to certain problems with UNICODE. See http://tinyurl.com/4k3au and in comp.lang.python Serge Orlov's reply in thread "Re: UTF-8 in German, Scandinavian letters". Sorry if the subject has been discussed on earlier occasions without my noticing, but if you're wrestling with UNICODE in Suse 9.2 this might be useful information. Hopefully Suse will ship a new & improved version of Python soon. /DWM