It would be nice to find an appropriate place to document the solid general guidance Raymond provided; though merely mentioning it somewhere in the docs will not translate into it being noticed.  Not sure where to put it just yet...

Martin:  Is there a specific situation that prompted your discovering this behavior?  Mixing the spinning up of threads with the forking of processes requires appropriate planning to avoid problems and achieve desired performance.  If you have a thoughtful design to your code but are still triggering problems, can you share more of the motivation?


As a side note, this is more appropriately labeled as a 'behavior' rather than a 'crash' -- the Python executable does not crash in any way but merely hangs in an apparent lock contention.