This is due to the following line in checkenvironment.py: locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "") If you are restarting a VSM service remotely from OS X for example, the exported LC_CTYPE is "UTF-8", which is an unsupported locale setting. This means that the VSM service fails to start up again, which I imagine could be frustrating.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 3085 ***