Comment 6 for bug 798081

Importing gtk sets the default encoding to utf-8
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> import gtk
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'

pygtk's gtk is importing the obsolete gnomevfs lib which has a mode line
    # -*- mode: python; encoding: utf-8; -*-

I think the fix for this is to explicitly set the encoding to ascii, but my initial efforts to do
    # This encoding hack can be removed when lucid's "import gtk" is removed
    # from the code.
    sys.setdefaultencoding('ascii')
in lp_sitecustomize.py do not seem to work