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Just noting that "the usual" way to determine whether you're 
running under pythonw is to see whether

sys.executable.endswith("pythonw.exe")

The usual way to get a do-nothing file object on Windows is 
to open the special (to Windows) file named "nul" (that's akin 
to opening the special file /dev/null on Unixish boxes).

Note that file('nul').fileno() does return a handle on Windows, 
despite that it's not a file in the filesystem.