I only see two problems. 1) They don't handle the few characters that are in Windows-1252 but not Latin-1. 2) They don't handle the trailing "\0\0" that is needed on the end of wide strings. (1) certainly hasn't bothered me enough to jump through other hoops very often. (2) can be a real problem in some situations and no problem at all in others.

Oh, and problem (1) that I also mentioned regarding my versions isn't actually a problem for the UTF-18LE / UTF-8 versions; it is just a problem with "ASCII" versions (which really convert to/from Latin-1), now that I think of it.