Notice in the reply to Issue3907, "with 2.6, you have to use io.open() explicitly".  This is still true in Python 2.7, i.e. the new 3.x-compatible io library is not used by default in Python 2.  If you want to use it with subprocess.Popen, one way is to supply a pipe with an io wrapper, perhaps something like:

import io, os
i, o = os.pipe()
piperead = io.open(i,'rb',buffering=0)
p = subprocess.Popen(..., stdout=o)

See Chapter 15 of the Python 2.7 Standard Library doc for more information on the io module: http://docs.python.org/library/io.html