I have never seen this failure on any Apple x86_64 running 10.x including 10.6.8.  Could you please report what Mac model you are running on and the output from running the following:

$ uname -m
$ /path/to/your/python
Python 3.2.1 (v3.2.1:ac1f7e5c0510, Jul  9 2011, 01:03:53) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> sys.maxsize
9223372036854775807
>>> import platform
>>> platform.mac_ver()
('10.6.8', ('', '', ''), 'i386')
>>> platform._mac_ver_xml()
('10.6.8', ('', '', ''), 'i386')
>>> platform._mac_ver_gestalt()  # a bug!
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.2/lib/python3.2/platform.py", line 761, in _mac_ver_gestalt
    return release,versioninfo,machine
>>> import os
>>> os.uname()
('Darwin', 'fimt.baybryj.net', '10.8.0', 'Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun  7 16:33:36 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_I386', 'i386')

Thanks!