Windows locale: default charset

[antonmuhin íà rambler.ru]

Dear Pythonists!

Does anybody know how to solve the following problem:

I want to find out default Windows charset to perform
encoding/decoding of Unicode strings.

locale module seems of no help---nl_langinfo function that could
provide me with needed info isn't included in ActiveState Python 2.2.
I found no similar functions in win extensions modules either.

May anybody point me info or snippets?

Best regards,
Anton.