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> Have you figured out why you're getting an error message?

The underlying shell spits a message out somewhere other than stdout 
or stderr?  Here's a cut-n-paste from the Solaris system in question:

$ python
Python 2.2.1 (#2, Sep  9 2002, 17:22:35) [C] on sunos5
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.system('less')
sh: less: not found
256
>>> os.system('less 2>/dev/null')
sh: less: not found
256
>>> os.system('less >/dev/null 2>/dev/null')
sh: less: not found
256
>>> os.system('less >/dev/null 2>&1')
sh: less: not found

My guess is that on Solaris 8 /bin/sh (which is  a real old-fashioned 
Bourne shell, not bash trying to pretend it's the Bourne shell) actually 
spits that message out to /dev/tty instead of stderr.