Yes, unfortunately my experience so far seems to bear this out. After mucking around for a while I came up with the following code, which doesn't really solve anything but perhaps may inspire one wiser than me to share a better solution...

use warnings;
use strict;

use PPM::Repositories;
use Encode::Guess;

# OS Call on German WinXP
my $result = `ping -n 1 jenda.krinicky.cz ` . "\n"; 
my $encoding;

#works, as expected.
print "cp437:\n";
$encoding = guess_encoding_cp437($result);
if ( ref( $encoding ) ) {  
    test_ping_result($result, $encoding->name); 
} else {
    print "Couldn't guess encoding.\n";
}

#doesn't work
print "default:\n";
$encoding = guess_encoding_default($result);
if ( ref( $encoding ) ) {  
    test_ping_result($result, $encoding->name); 
} else {
    print "Couldn't guess encoding.\n";
}

#doesn't work.
print "kitchen sink:\n";
$encoding = guess_encoding_default($result);
if ( ref( $encoding ) ) {  
    test_ping_result($result, $encoding->name); 
} else {
    print "Couldn't guess encoding.\n";
}

sub test_ping_result {
    my $result = shift;
    my $encoding = shift;

    Encode::from_to($result,"$encoding",'iso-8859-1');

    print "encoding: $encoding\n";
    print "result: $result\n";

    if ($result =~ /Überprüfen/) { # should match but fails because of
+ german characters
        print "Ping timed out \n";
    } else {
        #good repository.    
        print "Ping ok \n";
    }   
}

sub guess_encoding_cp437 {
    my $data = shift;    
    my $enc = guess_encoding($data, ('cp437'));
    return $enc;
}

sub guess_encoding_default {
    my $data = shift;    
    my $enc = guess_encoding($data);
    return $enc;
}

sub guess_encoding_kitchen_sink {
    my $data = shift;    
    my $enc = guess_encoding($data, ( Encode->encodings() ) );
    return $enc;
}
__END__

Outputs: 

cp437:
encoding: cp437
result: Ping-Anforderung konnte Host "jenda.krinicky.cz" nicht finden.
+ Überprüfen Sie den Namen, und versuchen Sie es erneut.



Ping timed out 
default:
Couldn't guess encoding.
kitchen sink:
Couldn't guess encoding.
[download]

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