International characters in username/password

Hi all,

Does anybody know how to get "mount.cifs -ocredentials=path/to/file" to work 
when there are international characters in the credentials file?

I tested this with a password containing the £ (British pound) sign and I got 
the following error:

   mount error 13 = Permission denied
   Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

The credentials file appears to be UTF-8, with all the characters one byte wide 
except for the "£" sign which is encoded as "0xc2 0xa3".

I am using samba-client-3.0.33-3.15.el5_4.1 with linux-2.6.27 and Windows 2003 
Server to host the share.

Regards,

Alex