This problem was reported by Jack Howarth (https://gna.org/users/jhowarth) in the post at
https://mail.gna.org/public/relax-users/2008-10/msg00089.html (Message-id:
<20081024141150.GA879@...>).
The string.fromstring() function appears to be useless when switching between big and little endian
machines.
