Umlauts revisited: Now they prevent program from running

[Franz GEIGER]

I pull data out of an Excel sheet using DAO. There are field values
containing text strings. Everything works fine until a text reads e.g.
"Stück".

After stopping before the exception

"UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)"

occurs I display the field in the interactive window of PythonWin
(ActiveState 2.0 on NT4) by simply typing "fld.Value".

It displays u'St\374ck'.

Conversion into a Python string by applying print or str() yields:

"Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)"

Any idea how to overcome this?

Best regards
Franz GEIGER