How to use 8bit character sets?

[copx]

For some reason Python (on Windows) doesn't use the system's default 
character set and that's a serious problem for me.
I need to process German textfiles (containing umlauts and other > 7bit 
ASCII characters) and generally work with strings which need to be processed 
using the local encoding (I need to display the text using a Tk-based GUI 
for example). The only solution I managed to find was converting between 
unicode and latin-1 all the time (the textfiles aren't unicode, the output 
of the program isn't supposed to be unicode either). Everything worked fine 
until I tried to run the program on a Windows 9x machine.. It seems that 
Python on Win9x doesn't really support unicode (IIRC Win9x doesn't have real 
unicode support so that's not suprising).
Is it possible to tell Python to use an 8bit charset (latin-1 in my case) 
for textfile and string processing by default?

copx