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Martin, assuming the tests pass, I'm about to check in a 
change so that, under 2.3,

>>> import sys
>>> sys.version
'2.3a0 (#29, Nov 11 2002, 14:23:17) [MSC v.1200 32 bit 
(Intel)]
>>>

under MSVC 6.  Also gets rid of the _M_ALPHA code.  
Those are good changes regardless of the fate of the issue 
here, but at least poor John won't have to figure out how to 
trick the preprocessor into stringizing the value of 
_MSC_VER (that's not easy, alas).