The attached patch seems to fix the issue, but needs further testing. 

Warning: the patch is not entirely clean, the patch contains an 
unrelated change to setup.py.

The patch replaces some code that uses ctypes to read configuration data 
using the SystemConfiguration framework by a regular extension. 

With this patch the crasher goes away, I still have to do more testing 
and proper checking of the C code.

The patch is for the trunk, I expect it will cleanly port to 2.6. It 
will also need porting to 3.x later on.