Comment 5 for bug 827859

Steps to replicate, thanks to Paul Hoell in bug 833747.

1- install a language that may contain non-ascii characters (so far this has been observed in russian and german):
   sudo apt-get install language-pack-de language-pack-gnome-de
2- Launch checkbox using this installed language:
  LANG=de_AT.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=de_AT:de checkbox-gtk
3- Start a test run with all the tests. It's OK if you skip them, the problem gets triggered either way.

Expected result:
 - All tests run correctly and the run finishes.

Actual result:
- As seen in checkbox log file, any tests whose description contains non-ascii characters generate an exception (excerpt below).
- As soon as the first job specifying "user" gets dispatched to the backend, the backend crashes with the trace seen here. Since it crashed in the middle of executing a job, the frontend doesn't notice this condition and will wait forever. As Paul observed, the window eventually becomes unresponsive.

I won't set the bugs as duplicates as they potentially describe different issues and have to be addressed separately:

1- This bug (backend crashes when timeout has an invalid value).
2- bug 833747 (test execution fails when the description has non-ascii characters).