> @Guido, I recall a while back you explained the value of adding CWD to sys.path.  Would you mind providing some insight here

I think bpo-35971 or bpo-13475 are better places to discuss that, because this issue doesn't require CWD to be in the path. You can trigger this by any mechanism that would raise an exception in the Python code used to initialize the interpreter.

Even if we restrict it to the most common case - shadowing a part of the standard library - you would still be able to trigger this as long as you have *some* mechanism to manipulate the python path in the environment that allows you to put paths on there with higher precedence than the standard library.

I think the core question in this issue is whether errors in the Python code run during the interpreter initialization should crash the interpreter or exit gracefully with an error code.