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distutils is *trying* to make spawn work the same way 
across platforms, via spawn.py.  Help it!  You're not 
likely to get anywhere with a change to the os.spawn family 
because you already know it will break code -- and it will 
break disutils in particular.  If you want to break code, 
this needs a PEP first:  write up your "two stage" approach 
in PEP and let the community have at it.  If you read 
c.l.py, you should have a feel for how warmly that's likely 
to be received <wink>.

The bit about __argv was just FYI (you seemed unaware of 
it; I agree it's irrelevant to what you want to achieve).