> Possibly we could handle "python[.exe]" literals by substituting 
> sys.executable transparently?

Perhaps generalize this as splitext(basename(sys.executable))[0] in order to support names other than "python" and "pythonw". It would have to handle quoting enough to ignore an initial double quote when parsing the executable name out of an args string, or _winapi could wrap the shell's CommandLineToArgvW function to handle this.