Whenever I encounter such things I think: undocumented assumptions are bleh

So I grep Gtk2 for utf8, nothing relevant, then I grep for @ARGV and I find that its Gtk2s -init option is known to manipulate @ARGV -- mystery solved :)

Though I can't see ( GPerlArgv* gperl_argv_new () ) how/why the utf8 bits don't get copied properly -- could be the g_strdup stuff