diff --git a/src/msw/control.cpp b/src/msw/control.cpp
index 8e72df223d..88508423ab 100644
--- a/src/msw/control.cpp
+++ b/src/msw/control.cpp
@@ -162,6 +162,20 @@ bool wxControl::MSWCreateControl(const wxChar *classname,
         return false;
     }
 
+#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);
+#endif // !wxUSE_UNICODE
+
     // install wxWidgets window proc for this window
     SubclassWin(m_hWnd);