Unicode default encoding

What is the correct way to set PythonCE's default Unicode encoding?  My 
reading (Python in a Nutshell) indicates that I am supposed to make a change 
to site.py, but there doesn't seem to be a site.py in PythonCE.  (The closest 
I came is a site.pyc in python23.zip.)  Nutshell suggests that in desperation 
one could put the following at the start of the main script:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('iso-8859-15')
del sys.setdefaultencoding

This code solved the problem I was having reading and processing text that 
contains Unicode characters, but I am uncomfortable leaving a desperation 
solution in place.
-- 
Jeffrey Barish