Comment 3 for bug 1154107

I haven't been able to reproduce this on my machine either but it happens in all our Jenkins VM's unless I use the beforementioned workaround.

So far I know that:
- The machines locale needs to be set to something UTF-8
- the produced error message needs to contain some extended ascii characters (>128)

To me it seems the error happens deeper down in python test tools. Not sure if autopilot passes some invalid characters or its actually a bug in the test tools.

If you really can't figure what's happening we can prepare a Jenkins VM where you can reproduce the issue for you.