In /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/invest/about.py in line 30, col 28, there's a non-ASCII character. In order to respect PEP-0263 and work flawlessly with Python 2.5, encoding must be declared at the beggining of the file. So, it's just adding: # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the first or second line (others are not valid).
gnome-applets 2.20 stable on all arches, has this fixed.