Thank you. I had already read what you posted. However, this does not solve the problem.

What I am trying to point to in my post is that of two Tk methods, one is broken chooseDirectory for reading unicode paths, the other getOpenFile/getSaveFile seems to have no problem with unicode paths, even if in the POD of getOpenFile/getSaveFile there is a link See "CAVEATS" in Tk::chooseDirectory. I'd really much like to have some insights in what it seems to me a strange situation.