windows: prevent bytes from being passed to registry APIs
There was a TortoiseHg bug report in this area[1], and from inspection, it looks
like passing `b""` as `valname` would fail to convert to unicode. The
underlying API allows both `""` and `NULL` to return the default value for the
key.
[1] https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg/-/issues/5803
{
"conduit_uri": "https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/api",
"phabricator.uri": "https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/",
"repository.callsign": "HG",
"arc.land.onto.default": "@",
"base": "hg:.^"
}