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There is not much I can add here.  I understand and 
appreciate your concerns.  However, as Tim and Martin have 
stated, something is missing from the puzzle.  PYTHONPATH 
is *not* ignored in debug builds.

The reason for the _d is 2-fold:
* As Martin said, the object layout may change.
* The Python core and extensions sometimes share CRT 
objects - notably file handles, and in some cases memory 
blocks.  It is critical that these come from the same CRT.

I could possibly agree that the "_d" convention is dumb and 
should be dropped.  However, it is unclear to me that this 
bug can be simply summarised as this.  This is probably 
because it is unclear to me how this bug can be summarised 
at all :)