I have made some updates in the streams code. Better error handling (getting errno by GetLastError() and raising exception when zero bytes are written on non-zero input). This prevents the infinite loop in BufferedIOWriter.flush() when there is odd number of bytes (WriteConsoleW accepts UTF-16-LE so only even number of bytes is written). It also prevents the same infinite loop when the buffer is too big to write at once (see http://bugs.python.org/issue11395 ). The limit of 32767 bytes was added to raw write.