Mac OS 10.6 __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING

Exactly what I've encountered.
Set pbcopy to use UTF-8 by default
See this post:

Authored by: patashnik on Mon, Sep 14 2009 at 12:13PM PDT
I ran into an interesting issue with Snow Leopard regarding
this hint: applications started from Terminal with the "open"
command wouldn't respond to the usual shortcuts (Cmd-Q -> Quit,
etc). A cryptic message would appear in the log: "Failed to get
CharCodes from EventRef (-9870)".

I narrowed this down to the __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING environment
variable, which I set according to this hint. When the variable
is unset, the issues are gone.

I found that if I "open" applications from terminal,
all "cmd+" shortcuts are no effects, e.g., cmd+c,
cmd+w, cmd+q, cmd+v, etc. I thought this was a 10.6 bug,
awaiting a fix. Also, mplayer would stop working like frozen,
when i press cmd+f, which is a full screen shortcut.
It would display this error:

2009-12-20 15:53:19.345 mplayer[3665:903]
Failed to get CharCodes from EventRef (-9870)

Then I unset it, (set __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING)
anything seems fine now, including cmd+ key binding,
and! pbcopy and pbpaste with UTF-8 characters.

Mmm.... it seems that __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING is only
needed in Mac OS 10.5 (not sure about 10.4), and if you
set it on Mac OS 10.6, it would cause key binding problems.

OK, glad it's solved. Thanks for google... or I guess
I would wait for this fix forever. Too few people
encountered this problem.

BTW, "Mplayer OSX Extended" and "VLC" are all buggy.
The best video player should be "mplayer" installed by
MacPorts.... It has almost no bugs, and runs efficiently.
Video would delay about a few ms playing on VLC on my comp.