Thanks for the thoughts - much appreciated! The threaded super-goat was indeed the offender. A very aggressive QA tester got us enough of a pattern to identify the offending module: pyOpenSSL. After looking at it closely, we found there are problems with its thread handling. In particular, the GIL is not properly locked when manipulating reference counts and also, in once case, when creating a new python object. Once we cleaned that up we were unable to reproduce the problem.
We'll post the fixes back to the pyOpenSSL folks shortly. Thanks again! Dave -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
