diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 4c8d368..40e06f0 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -12,6 +12,9 @@
 Core and Builtins
 -----------------
 
+- Issue #1342: On windows, Python could not start when installed in a
+  directory with non-ascii characters.
+
 - Implement PEP 3121: new module initialization and finalization API.
 
 - Removed the already-defunct ``-t`` option.
diff --git a/Python/import.c b/Python/import.c
index dadae2e..14cda6e 100644
--- a/Python/import.c
+++ b/Python/import.c
@@ -1364,19 +1364,26 @@
 		if (!v)
 			return NULL;
 		if (PyUnicode_Check(v)) {
-			v = _PyUnicode_AsDefaultEncodedString(v, NULL);
+			v = PyUnicode_AsEncodedString(v, 
+			    Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding, NULL);
 			if (v == NULL)
 				return NULL;
 		}
-		if (!PyBytes_Check(v))
+		else if (!PyBytes_Check(v))
 			continue;
+		else
+			Py_INCREF(v);
+
 		base = PyBytes_AS_STRING(v);
 		size = PyBytes_GET_SIZE(v);
 		len = size;
 		if (len + 2 + namelen + MAXSUFFIXSIZE >= buflen) {
+			Py_DECREF(v);
 			continue; /* Too long */
 		}
 		strcpy(buf, base);
+		Py_DECREF(v);
+
 		if (strlen(buf) != len) {
 			continue; /* v contains '\0' */
 		}
@@ -3155,8 +3162,8 @@
 	if (!_PyArg_NoKeywords("NullImporter()", kwds))
 		return -1;
 
-	if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "s:NullImporter",
-			      &path))
+	if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "es:NullImporter",
+			      Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding, &path))
 		return -1;
 
 	pathlen = strlen(path);
diff --git a/Python/pythonrun.c b/Python/pythonrun.c
index 3df5793..ae5856a 100644
--- a/Python/pythonrun.c
+++ b/Python/pythonrun.c
@@ -695,7 +695,7 @@
 	PyObject *std = NULL;
 	int status = 0, fd;
 	PyObject * encoding_attr;
-	char *encoding, *errors;
+	char *encoding = NULL, *errors;
 
 	/* Hack to avoid a nasty recursion issue when Python is invoked
 	   in verbose mode: pre-import the Latin-1 and UTF-8 codecs */