I have a 4 gigabyte bz2 compressed tarfile containing some 3.3 
million documents. I have a script which opens this file with "r:bz2" 
and is simply iterating over the contents using next(). With 2.4.1 I 
still get an Overflow error (originally tried with 2.3.5 as packaged in 
Mac OS 10.4.1):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "extract_part.py", line 47, in ?
    main(sys.argv)
  File "extract_part.py", line 39, in main
    pathnames = find_valid_paths(argv[1], 1024, count)
  File "extract_part.py", line 13, in find_valid_paths
    f = tf.next()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/tarfile.py", line 1584, in next
    self.fileobj.seek(self.offset)
OverflowError: long int too large to convert to int