I must say that Vinay's findings are most interesting.  Thanks Vinay
for tracking this down!

Just a thought, but has anybody tried this using the subprocess
module?  I've glanced through subprocess.py and it certainly does not
use os.system().  Instead it uses CreateProcess() on windows and
os.execvp*() on all other platforms.  It also appears to go to great
effort to properly deal with file handles, so I'm wondering if that
would resolve this issue.  (The current 2.6 docs, state that the
subprocess "module is preferable" over the os.system() call, and that
"All of the popen*() functions are obsolete. Use the subprocess
module.")

I'm quite curious to see if my ConcurrentLogHandler will fare any
better with this scenario.  I would really like for it to be able to
handle this scenario, since it's design goals are to be resilient to
this type of thing.  But I'm relying on the threading system and locks
too, so it's hard to say what will happen.

Robert, I agree that submitting a new bug on this would be a good idea
if none currently exists.  I also think it would be good to to put a
warning in the docs about this scenario if there is nothing that can
be done to correct the situation.  Even it if is not Python-specific
thing, I think it is good to let people know about gotchas whenever
possible.