sre is broken in SuSE 9.2

[Denis S. Otkidach]

On all platfroms \w matches all unicode letters when used with flag
re.UNICODE, but this doesn't work on SuSE 9.2:

Python 2.3.4 (#1, Dec 17 2004, 19:56:48) 
[GCC 3.3.4 (pre 3.3.5 20040809)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import re
>>> re.compile(ur'\w+', re.U).match(u'\xe4')
>>> 

BTW, is correctly recognize this character as lowercase letter:
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.category(u'\xe4')
'Ll'

I've looked through all SuSE patches applied, but found nothing related.
What is the reason for broken behavior?  Incorrect configure options?

-- 
Denis S. Otkidach
http://www.python.ru/      [ru]