I think you need to bite the bullet and convert all your char variables and constants to TCHAR. If you do not, you will continue to have problems like this. If it were easy to solve the multi-byte to Unicode to multi-byte character conversion issues that solution would be part of the CString class. The changes you need to make are mechanical. You need to put _T() around all your string and character literals. You need to change all your char variables to TCHAR. I don't know how big your project is, or if you have access to all the source. I suspect you have spent more time trying to avoid the issue than a proper fix would require.