Catastrophic error: could not set locale

I am getting a fairly strange error message from NVCC (CUDA 4.2 on Windows Vista):

Catastrophic error: could not set locale “.1252” to allow processing of multibyte characters

Googling for it did not give any results; I have a feeling that it is some kind of misconfiguration
problem, so I believe this is the appropriate forum to ask.

For the record, the command line (slightly edited to remove long paths) is

“C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v4.2\bin\nvcc.exe” -gencode=arch=compute_20,code="sm_21,compute_20" -gencode=arch=compute_20,code="sm_21,compute_20" --machine 32 -ccbin “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin” -Xcompiler “/EHsc /W3 /nologo /O2 /Zi /MD " -I"C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_47” -I"C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v4.2\include" -maxrregcount=0 --compile -o “Release/ProductPoint.cu.obj” “ProductPoint.cu”

Help will be much appreciated :-)

Cyril