This is also proving to be a problem in various places for applications
embedding Python 2.5 on Linux. For example, my EventScripts plugin
embeds Python into Counter-Strike: Source game servers. It's not
uncommon at all for these servers to use a colon in their path names, as
rental companies will often assign the directories as
myuser/IPADDRESS:PORT/cstrike. For embedding Python we have some tricks
that allow us to bypass this sometimes, but it is rather inconvenient.

In addition to sys.path, I haven't looked into it deeply, but I believe
the codecs search path also seems to get confused when the local
directory has a colon somewhere in it.

Please consider revitalizing this bug, if possible. Thanks for
considering it.