After talking with Richard, I think the best way to attack this issue 
(and the other ones around suite unreliability) is to remove the 
unreliable test cases for the first beta, and then refactor the suite 
post beta with an eye towards reliability and clarity. Personally, I 
would like to break the suites up in the the test_multiprocessing.py 
script to be more in the vein of other tests in Lib/test/...

I removed the more unreliable test cases while keeping the core ones and 
wrote a quick bash script to do a burn-in of the "make tests" command, 
for 100 loops, I was unable to get the tests to hang with the reduced 
suite.

I ran the same thing on trunk and py3k just to make sure I could not get 
it to hang/crash.