python 2.6 ascii codec error

i am trying to move to python 2.6 and latest cheetah 2.4. i am getting
this error with python 2.6 and cheetah 2.4.
the same template was working well with python 2.5 and cheetah 2.0.1.
thanks for the help

  File "/home/mark/work/common/web/cheetah.py", line 95, in render
    compiled_tmpl = _compiletemplate(template, base=base, isString=isString)
  File "/home/mark/work/common/web/utils.py", line 387, in __call__
    update(block=True)
  File "/home/mark/work/common/web/utils.py", line 382, in update
    self.cache[key] = (self.func(*args, **keywords), time.time())
  File "/home/mark/work/common/web/cheetah.py", line 41, in __compiletemplate
    tmpl_compiler = Compiler(source=text, mainClassName='GenTemplate')
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/Cheetah-2.4.0-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/Cheetah/Compiler.py",
line 1588, in __init__
    source = unicode(source)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
7550: ordinal not in range(128)

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