With #8611 and #9425, I patched a lot of functions and modules, including the NullImporter and zipimport, but not the core of the import machinery.

In my import_unicode SVN branch, I patched the import machinery to manipulate unicode strings, instead of bytes strings. But the patch is huge and the import machinery is fragile. Since Python 3.2 now works in a non-ASCII directory with an ASCII locale (fileystem) encoding, I don't plan to merge the patch into py3k.

The patch is still useful on Windows, because Python uses the mbcs encoding to encode/decode filenames, and this encoding is usually a very small subset of Unicode (eg. cp1252 is 256 codes wheres unicode 6.0 has 109,449 characters).