diff --git a/compiler/ghci/InteractiveUI.hs b/compiler/ghci/InteractiveUI.hs
index 6d7bcfb8f13ba11c4d863565d71f958c5ead37a2..7c64941ab23a93f6d700d55c4c0da1a84862ad3d 100644
--- a/compiler/ghci/InteractiveUI.hs
+++ b/compiler/ghci/InteractiveUI.hs
@@ -1536,14 +1536,17 @@ setUpConsole = do
 	-- similarly for characters we write to the console.
 	--
 	-- At the moment, GHCi pretends all input is Latin-1.  In the
-	-- future we should support UTF-8, but for now we set the code pages
-	-- to Latin-1.
+	-- future we should support UTF-8, but for now we set the code
+	-- pages to Latin-1.  Doing it this way does lead to problems,
+	-- however: see bug #1649.
 	--
 	-- It seems you have to set the font in the console window to
 	-- a Unicode font in order for output to work properly,
 	-- otherwise non-ASCII characters are mapped wrongly.  sigh.
 	-- (see MSDN for SetConsoleOutputCP()).
 	--
+        -- This call has been known to hang on some machines, see bug #1483
+        --
 	setConsoleCP 28591       -- ISO Latin-1
 	setConsoleOutputCP 28591 -- ISO Latin-1
 #endif