The following call is missing in Py_Initialize():

*** pythonrun.c,1       Mon May  7 14:41:29 2001
--- pythonrun.c Mon May  7 14:42:39 2001
***************
*** 147,152 ****
--- 147,153 ----
 
        /* phase 2 of builtins */
        _PyImport_FixupExtension
("__builtin__", "__builtin__");
+       _PyImport_FixupExtension
("exceptions", "exceptions");
 
        initsigs(); /* Signal handling stuff, 
including initintr() */           

Without this patch, you might get this exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/export/home/jhe/ns/httpd-
8332.195.226.107.82/cgi-bin/extest.py", line 1, in ?
    import exceptions
ImportError: Cannot re-init internal module 
exceptions                          

This bug was probably introduced when exception.py 
became a built-in extension module. Applies to both 
2.0 and 2.1 code.

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Assigning this to Barry. I suspect this is related to SF bug
#449151.

I wonder if this would be sufficient to fix that bug?

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user_id=12800

I think this is a good patch to install, since it makes
reload(exceptions) act just like reload(sys).  To me, both
are fundamental modules.  So I'm accepting this one and
adding a test case.

But I don't think/know whether this is related to 449151
because I haven't actually been able to reproduce the
problem described in that bug report yet.