After exploring the bug database I discovered that this bug has been reported since March, and appears to derive from a bug in Python itself.
http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=38052 It apparently only happens when the code generated by Makepy is really big (which it is for Word or Excel). So my options are to downgrade from Python 2.4.1 to 2.3.5 or to use Late Binding instead of Early Binding (as described in Hammond and Robinson, Ch. 12). The easiest path will be to use Early Binding, because as far as I can tell the only significant changes to code will be that I have to use integer literals instead of named constants. In my case this means replacing 'win32com.client.constants.wdSendToNewDocument' with '0' (zero). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
