semanage command fails with unsupported locale setting in RHEL 5.4

Issue

• The following command fails intermittently:

[root@]# /usr/sbin/semanage login -a -s remotesupport_u -r s0-s0:c0.c1023 remote
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/semanage", line 33, in ?
    sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.__stderr__, 'replace')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/locale.py", line 417, in getpreferredencoding
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/locale.py", line 381, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting