I'm still in a state of semi-confusion with all of this encoding stuff. But my understanding of the problem I had, was that the program that saved the file, didn't use the right encoding when it saved the file, so when my local system tried to read it, I would see a 2 letter set, in place of the unicode character. graff's method of decoding it, would automagically convert the filenames to be recognized by my system.

It isn't hard to make your own custom file selector dialog, and if you do, it would be easy to run decode on the files first. Maybe you could sub-class getOpenFile, to do a decode routine first?

See Re: problems with extended ascii characters in filenames if you are interested.

And there is the often given tip, which I don't quite understand

$Tk::encodeFallback=1
[download]

Then again, I probably don't even understand your problem, :-)