The new patch looks much better - the only thing is that run_zip needs to do sys.path.pop(0) to correctly remove the zipfile from the front of the path.

However, I do see your point about whether or not including the current directory on sys.path is the right thing to do for this case - it may be better to set <zipfile_name>/__zipmain__.py as argv[0] before invoking PySys_SetArgv, and then use __zipmain__ as the module to be executed on the same code path as the -m switch normally uses.

Rather than continuing this discussion here on SF, it may be best to post your proposal to python-dev. I personally like the idea, but a new idiom for running Python scripts will need broader support than just me. Getting input from the py2exe and py2app folks that can be found on python-dev would also be good.