admin wrote:All I could do is to create always UNICODE files if the system has a DBCS codepage (as japan, korea, china, thailand). Is that good?
Not restricted to DBCS, but Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, among others would probably do "funny things."

If you are serious about the phrase "Explorer replacement," you have to find a way to handle this. There has to be a way. There are so many mp3 tag editors, for exmaple, that can handle unicode fine. There is no reason you alone can't find a way to handle it
What does Explorer when you drop an "ö" in Japan?
Windows has been in full-unicode since Windows 2000. Of course it can handle "ö". I don't really get why you keep asking about Windows native applications such as Explorer and Notepad. Why doubt? It's been a long time since Windows 2000. It's high time for other applications to catch up with this.