String gets corrupted when passed byte array containing bytes with MSB set

Running under Solaris 2.7 with either the Production JDK 1.2 or
the hotspot beta (1.2.1), if a String object is created from
a byte array containing bytes whose MSB is set, String.getBytes()
returns different byte array contents.

This works fine in the JDK 1.2 Reference release.

See attachment for a simple test case.
###@###.### 1999-04-16