I downloaded the file from the URL given above, and when I tried to decompress it in a single shot (with bz2.decompress), python crashes.  Reading the raw bz2 data from file into a string in memory works ok, but attempting to use bz2.decompress on that data causes the crash.

I could only get this to happen under 2.5.1 on a Windows XP machine (media center edition); it seems to work ok on OSX (Python 2.5) and Linux (both 2.4.4 and the current trunk).  I will be able to take a closer look at this tomorrow when I have access to a Windows machine with a compiler on it.