Graham Dumpleton has informed me that the the relevant bug reports are: http://bugs.python.org/issue8098 http://bugs.python.org/issue9260
To quote: All the problems derive from a stupid function in Python internals called PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(). It was designed to avoid lockups of the import machinery but just causes other problems because a module import can fail if the import lock is held by a different thread. This faulty magic fairy dust was sprinkled on the time.strptime() function which internally loads _strptime module. If you access time.strptime() when another thread holds the import lock, the call will fail because of a failed import. So there. As more people update to Python 3.3.0 hopefully this magic fairy dust workaround will see some daylight. -- Gnarlie -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
