I have not experienced this myself, but see
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2246384/multiprocessing-pool-hangs-when-there-is-a-exception-in-any-of-the-thread

This appears to be another case of http://bugs.python.org/issue1692335

I also recently reported a similar problem at http://bugs.python.org/issue13751

Looking at the code for `NoOptionError` (see below) in 2.6 at least it would indeed be subject to the same problem. Perhaps some attention could be paid to 
resolving 1692335, which would presumably make this vexing problem go away?

class NoOptionError(Error):
    """A requested option was not found."""

    def __init__(self, option, section):
        Error.__init__(self, "No option %r in section: %r" %
                       (option, section))
        self.option = option
        self.section = section