md5.hexdigest() converting unicode string to ascii

[uebertester]

"Krzysztof Stachlewski" <stach at fr.pl> wrote in message news:<c5om3d$iu4$1 at absinth.dialog.net.pl>...
> "Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.687.1082117438.20120.python-list at python.org...
> 
> > (unicode characters are characters too, you know...)
> 
> You're right. :-)
> 
> Stach

None of the suggestions seem to address the issue.  sValue =
_winreg.QueryValueEx(y,"") returns a tuple containing the following
(u'http://', 1).  The string u'http://' is added to the md5 object via
the update() and then hashed via hexdigest().  How do I keep the
unicode string from being converted to ascii with the md5 functions? 
Or can I?

Thanks again.