Cannot yum update - getting UnicodeDecodeError message

Issue

We updated the security patches on all our customer servers over the last month and I have come to download the security patches today ready for November 2014 patching and I am getting an error code.

# yum  update ▒--security --downloadonly --downloaddir=/home/sungard/patches_oct2014
Loaded plugins: downloadonly, rhnplugin, security
This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or RHN Satellite.
Skipping security plugin, no data
Setting up Update Process
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in ?
    yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 309, in user_main
    errcode = main(args)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 178, in main
    result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 349, in doCommands
    return self.yum_cli_commands[self.basecmd].doCommand(self, self.basecmd, self.extcmds)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yumcommands.py", line 202, in doCommand
    return base.updatePkgs(extcmds, update_to=(basecmd == 'update-to'))
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 620, in updatePkgs
    if not self.update(pattern=arg, update_to=update_to):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 2915, in update
    self.logger.critical(_('No Match for argument: %s') % arg)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)