Just to reiterate: The issue arises under the following two conditions:
You try 1) to start ANY (not only MakeHuman) Python2 based application 2) from a folder containing characters your current system localization does not (primary) support.
I'm pretty sure on my Windows system MakeHuman will startup without any problems from the folder, Rob used for testing, since the charters are supported by my primary localization (though I'm not sure about the odd ñ ...). This issue seems to be Python2 dependent. Obviously Python3 is doing better, at least Blender starts up flawless from a folder containing Russian characters. IIRC, Blender is some Pyhton3.5m based. So it's an issue we can't solve, but only give advices to the users.
I've tested the behavior with other Python2 dependent software like GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape... Usually they are installed to a system folder that is >100% ASCII compliant. But if you use their portable version, you are free to choose your installation folder and you can force the condition described above.
To me there is only the question: Are the few test cases, that demonstrated using non-ASCII characters of your current localization is save for installation, enough to establish the general rule that is valid for all localizations available? I'd say yes, but would feel better if more users with other localization could confirm the behavior. Unfortunately I was not able to download win7 Russian localization from Microsoft's homepage for further testing.
BTW, forcing other codepages with CHCP, like 65001 and trying to start MakeHuman from command line, made things even worse and the shell cheerfully crashed after entering the 'dir: command.