Sorry for the long delay -- I had to put the patch into production to
get the volume of work needed to reveal the problem. There has been no
occurrence for about two weeks now, so I am declaring victory.
(Previously it would happen about once a day.) Attached is
subprocess_nogc.py, which is subprocess.py with exactly the changes
you suggested.

On Oct 30, 2007 1:43 PM, Guido van Rossum <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Guido van Rossum added the comment:
>
> In Python, you can't raise an exception from file_dealloc. (Note how
> it is a void function -- there's no way to return an error status.)
>
> Disabling gc however makes sense. I'll think about that. Since you
> seem to have the only reproducible occurrence of this bug, try this:
> right after the "# Child" comment add a call to gc.disable(). You
> should import gc at the top of the module with the rest of the
> imports.
>
>
> __________________________________
> Tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue1336>
> __________________________________
>