IRB crashing silently with non ASCII characters?

Hi gurus and nubys,

I just noticed that if I type italian accented letters in a irb
session irb crashes silently:

C:\Documents and Settings\gabriele>irb
irb(main):001:0> è

(probably in this message this letter won't appear fine but is an
accented 'e'
This happens on a windows XP box, where I think the charset is
windows-1252 and irb goes down with every accented vocal.

ruby 1.8.2 (2004-06-29) [i386-mswin32] (latest one-click installer)