Removing Unicode from Python?

[Paradox]

In general I love Python for text manipulation but at our company we
have the need to manipulate large text values stored in either a SQL
Server database or text files. This data is stored in a "text" field
type and is definitely not unicode though it is often very strange
text since it is either OCR or some kinda electronic file extraction.
Unfortunately when it is retrieved into a string type in python it is
invariably a unicode type string. The best I can do is try and encode
it to 'latin-1' but that will often throw and error if I use the
ignore parameter then it will wack my data with a bunch of "?". I am
just not understanding why python is thinking stuff is unicode and why
it is failing on conversion. There is no way that a byte can not be
between 0 and 255 right? This problem can be so haunting that I will
start to wish I had coded the solution in VB where at least a string
is a string is a string. Is there a way to modify Python so that all
strings will always be single byte strings since we have no need for
Unicode support? Any solutions or suggestions to my biggest Python
annoyance would be greatly appreciated.

                Thanks Joey