Hey Jason,

Thanks for replying so quickly, and on a bank holiday! :)
This has completely diverged from the original bug, but whatever..

Thanks for the C wrapper too! It's not appropriate for my build environment, and I know no C, having only got so far as writing a hello world program with it, so I'll probably stick with my bash wrapper script for now.
Currently re-compiling python2.7.1 to support i686 machines. The first build wasn't allowing me to compile numpy with the supplied atlas libraries, failing to pick up the extension .so.3 / .so.3.0 which I think has something to do with position independent code, so I'm recompiling this 32 bit python with the following commands:-
$ export CFLAGS="-O2 -fPIC"
$ export CXXFLAGS=$CFLAGS
$ OPT=-m32 LDFLAGS=-m32 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/32

Does that seem sensible to you??
The relevant part of my bash wrapper script (for sun grid engine) is then something like:-

#!/bin/bash
if [[ "`uname -m`" = "x86_64" ]] ; then
        export PYTHONHOME=$HOME/
else   
        echo "arch = `uname -m`"
        export PYTHONHOME=$HOME/32
fi