That did it. Thanks a lot. I had not tried that because I had assumed that was the default under windows therefore not worth the trouble to look up the syntax. Is it always necessary to explicitly specify the crlf layer when using Unicode on windows?
Note that if layers are specified in the three-argument form, then default layers ... are ignored. Those layers will also be ignored if you specifying [sic] a colon with no name following it. In that case the default layer for the operating system (:raw on Unix, :crlf on Windows) is used.