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I do not have winXP or OSX available to actually test it,
but I doubt that
    top.wm_attributes('alpha',.8)
will work; from Tk documentation it looks like you will have
to write
    top.wm_attributes('-alpha',.8)
which is in fact not what one would expect.
Maybe a better solution than Greg's patch was to change
wm_attributes() to accept both ways, like:

def wm_attributes(self, *args, **kw):
    args = ('wm', 'attributes', self._w) + args +
self._options({}, kw)
    return self.tk.call(args)

so that old code will not break and the more intuitive
version that Greg suggested is also legal.