+#if !wxUSE_UNICODE
+ // Text labels starting with the character 0xff (which is a valid character
+ // in many code pages) don't appear correctly as CreateWindowEx() has some
+ // special treatment for this case, apparently the strings starting with -1
+ // are not really strings but something called "ordinals". There is no
+ // documentation about it but the fact is that the label gets mangled or
+ // not displayed at all if we don't do this, see #9572.
+ //
+ // Notice that 0xffff is not a valid Unicode character so the problem
+ // doesn't arise in Unicode build.
+ if ( !label.empty() && label[0] == -1 )
+ ::SetWindowText(GetHwnd(), label.wx_str());
+#endif // !wxUSE_UNICODE
+