<p>I just installed the first release candidate of Python 3.0 and got this error after typing:</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; help('modules foo')
</code></pre>

<pre>[...]
LookupError: unknown encoding: uft-8</pre>

<p>Notice that it says <strong>uft</strong>-8 and not <strong>utf</strong>-8</p>

<p>Is this a py3k specific bug or a misconfiguration on my part? I do not have any other versions of Python installed on this French locale Windows XP SP3 machine.</p>

<p><strong>Edit</strong></p>

<p>A <a href="http://bugs.python.org/issue4135?@ok_message=msg%2074871%20created%3Cbr%3Eissue%204135%20created&amp;@template=item" rel="nofollow noreferrer">bug</a> has been filled by <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/22899/alex-coventry">Alex Coventry</a> on October 16th.</p>

Looks like a typo in a config file somewhere, whether in the Py3k package or on your machine.  You might try installing the stable final Python 2.6 (which supports 3.0 syntax changes with imports from
```
__future__
```
), and if that works you should probably file a bug report.