Ah, perlguts; missed that one. That seems to provide a unifrom answer to all of my questions: I have to keep telling perl that my strings are UTF8, and I have to check every string I get back from perl to see if it is UTF8, and transcode from either UTF8 or the current locale back to UTF16, as appropriate.

A consequence is that -Mutf8 neither helps nor hurts me; since I'm telling perl that my strings are utf8 one-at-a-time, the global flag is irrelevant.

Thanks for the pointer. -nik