I, too, use Microsoft Windows. I run my perl scripts with TinyPerl, which is not great but it is sufficient for my needs. Anyways, I am not a perl expert. I'm very far from it! But I know that accessing files with Unicode characters in the name is a lot of hassle. So, I wrote a JavaScript program which runs in Windows (just save it as GetRidOfUnicode.js and double-click it) and it scans the current directory and all sub-directories and renames all files and directories which have Unicode characters or extended ASCII characters in the name and changes them to standard ASCII plain text characters. It's a quick and dirty script which I wrote in haste. But it works.

I have used Hungarian letters in my file names, and it was a bad habit. Anyway, this script changes many Hungarian letters and some others to plain text ASCII, and the rest of the Unicode characters are changed to spaces.

After you run this, all files will become easily accessible from perl:

http://www.wzsn.net/js/RenameUnicode.txt