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Yes, I read the message (and most of the thread) :)

Apologies for re-opening this bug, but I believe that
something can still be done about it.

I'm using Windows 2K (SP 2), so those patches don't apply to
me.  Those patches merely prevent windows crashing on
certain types of accesses to devices, e.g. the now
well-known C:\NUL\NUL bug.  They don't prevent applications
from hanging when trying to access prn.txt.

Further in the thread starting at that URL, there is some
discussion of possible work-arounds for safely
opening/creating files.  I'm not a Win32 C programmer, so
I've no idea about the technical feasibility of these
solutions in Python.

While I agree that the real problem is in the OS, it seems
to be standard behaviour now for apps to workaround it.  For
example, Textpad (www.textpad.com) will just pop up a dialog
saying "You cannot create this file: this name is reserved
device name" or something similar.  Whether they've just
hard-coded a list of known names or if they're doing
something more advanced I don't know.

This caused a fair bit of confusion for me recently: Python
hung inexplicably in splitting a CSV file of stock data into
seperate files, and one of the Australian Stock Exchange's
stock symbols is "PRN".  The script was extremely simple, so
I eventually realised what was going on, but I dread an
unwary person having to debug this problem in a larger
application.

If you think this sort of ugliness doesn't belong in Python
then feel free to close this bug again, and I won't feel
offended :)