T74510 seems to be turning into a jumble of various encoding
related issues, this is one of them.
This specific patch fixes the incorrect behaviour of BLI_getenv returning ascii on windows rather than utf-8 resulting in problems when using the BLENDER_USER_CONFIG environment variable to point to a path with non ascii characters.
all tests pass on windows, given all code is in a windows only guard no testing should be needed on other platforms.