This also affects 2.7, I just worked on 2.6 because this is where I encountered the issue.

> As for 2.7: please try explaining again what specific issue the patch
> is meant to resolve? What monkey-patching are you referring to? What 
> destructor? Why is aliasing these functions going to solve a problem?

As mentioned above I cannot provide more information because I am unable to find the root of the issue.  All I know is that if the atexit handler is executed after the module globals were set to None it fails to shutdown properly.

The old monkey patch can be found here: http://svn.python.org/view/python/tags/r261/Lib/multiprocessing/util.py?revision=71601&view=markup

I am pretty sure that this is one way to trigger the issue but by itself not the root of the problem.