Ok, now I'm very confused, even though I just solved my problem. I copied the entire contents of the original file (evil2.gfx) from my hex editor and pasted it into a text file. When I read from *this* file using my original code, everything worked fine. When I read the 21st byte, it came up as the correct \x00. Why this didn't work in trying to read from the original file, I don't know, since the hex values should be the same, but oh well...
-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list