I encountered this when somebody used:

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.CRITICAL,
                    format='%(asctime)s %(levelname)-8s %(message)s',
                    datefmt='%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S',
                    filename=os.devnull,
                    filemode='w')

the logging code apparently calls os.path.abspath(filename) somewhere,
causing an exception:
 File "c:\python264\lib\logging\__init__.py", line 838, in _open
   stream = open(self.baseFilename, self.mode)
   IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '\\\\nul'

Seems fine to me, does not raise any errors. My OS is OS X Snow Leopard. I checked it in python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 too, no issues raised.

Shashwat-Anands-MacBook-Pro:test l0nwlf$ python2.6
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul  7 2009, 23:51:51) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os,logging
>>> logging.basicConfig(level=logging.CRITICAL,
...                     format='%(asctime)s %(levelname)-8s %(message)s',
...                     datefmt='%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S',
...                     filename=os.devnull,
...                     filemode='w')
>>>

From the bug report, it look likes its specific to windows, not OS X.

nul is a special "dos device"
_getfullpathname() correctly returns \\.\nul, but normpath() then simplifies it to \\nul

I suggest that normpath() be changed to consider \\.\ as a special prefix, and keep it intact when it appears at the start of the path. See also
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx

This bug does not exhibit in Python 3.1.1.

Attaching a test against trunk which elicits the error reported in this bug.

Followed Amaury's suggestion in r83368.  \\.\ and \\?\ as prefixes now cause normpath() to return the argument as-is.