Sorry for being so terse and not filling in the gaps! In the end, I changed my mind on this bug - it's not an installer issue.

The 2.6.5 MSI installer, when asked to compile .pyc files, exits with an error as reported here:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2010-March/1240182.html

Both Problem#1 and Problem#3 (as reported in this issue) apply to the 2.6.5 installer. Properly quoting the -x argument fixed Problem#1 (already done). But Problem#3 still applies: compileall fails on one test case in lib2to3 because of a syntax error (this was not so clearly stated in the c.l.p. post). The error is:

SyntaxError: ('invalid syntax', ('d:\\apps\\python26\\Lib\\lib2to3\\tests\\data\\py2_test_grammar.py', 936, 23, '        with manager(), manager():\n'))

That syntax is not 2.6 compatible (but 2.7 does allow it).

My initial idea was to completely exclude lib2to3\tests from being precompiled, as done in r78994 for py3k, and both for 2.6 and 2.7. But after looking more closely to the error (and noticing that it is legal in 2.7) I'd leave the installer as it is, and report the issue in py2_test_grammar.py as a separate bug.