Message5602

This is probably the easiest way to reproduce this:
>>> unicode(Exception(u'\xe4'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Interestingly this works:
>>> unicode(Exception(u'\xe4').args[0])
u'\xe4'

I used Jython 2.5.1 to test this. With Python 2.6.2 both of the above examples return u'\xe4' as expected.