Be more robust when strerror() doesn't give a useful result.

Back-patch commits 8e68816cc2567642c6fcca4eaac66c25e0ae5ced and
8dace66e0735ca39b779922d02c24ea2686e6521 into the stable branches.
Buildfarm testing revealed no great portability surprises, and it
seems useful to have this robustness improvement in all branches.