First of all, thanks for working on this.  Now for some feedback :)

It is most helpful if you provide patches against trunk (which is 2.7 alpha right now).  We then forward port them to py3k.  (This will change after the release of 2.7, when py3k will become trunk.)

Isn't the assert you added to nameCheck redundant?  It seems to me it would be better just to remove the abspath call on ndir from the existing assert.

I haven't applied and tested the patch, but the other changes to the tests look odd to me.  Why are you obtaining the abspath of the current directory?  And why do those tests need to be changed at all?

Your additional test case looks like it might be some exploration code you forgot to delete before generating the patch, maybe those other changes are as well?