The problem: without the stack being 16-byte aligned, code generated by modern compilers like recent gcc/g++ or clang assumed that the stack is 16 byte aligned and uses SSE instructions in some circumstances that require this.  Without this fix, any ctypes call into such code will crash.

I mentioned this in the comment on issue17192 which seeks to update our ancient copy of libffi but we may want to do this independently of that.

In 2.7, we're running into the stack being misaligned in 32-bit x86 code which is something a libffi update fixes.  It is a trivial patch:

 http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/58128/

which made it into the official libffi releases in 2010 via https://github.com/atgreen/libffi/commit/3f5b1375ab1e2b8e3d593e21b27097a4a50f9b83#src/x86/sysv.S.

patch against 2.7 attached.  it should apply to any tree easily enough.