sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the standard
default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This safes quite a few cycles
during startup since the first call to .setdefaultencoding() will
initialize the codec registry and the encodings package.

See python-dev for a discussion (Subject: "[Python-Dev] [comp.lang.python] sys.setdefaultencoding (2.0b1)").
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