Fast and capable XML parser?

[Magnus Lycka]

I'm looking for some library to parse XML code
much faster than the libs built into Python 2.4
(I'm stuck with 2.4 for quite a while) and I
also need XML Schema validation, and would
appreciate support for e.g. XPath and XInclude.
I also want an API which is more Pythonic than
e.g. a thin wrapper over a C or C++ API.

It should be available on at least Linux,
Solaris and AIX.

Some uses involve parsing lots of (often small)
XML files at reasonable speed, i.e. several
hundred files per second. That means that we
can't use anything like an os.system call to
xmllint for XML Schema validation--it gets too
slow. I also suspect that the standard Python
libs (in Python 2.4 at least) are slower than
we'd like them to be. (Not that it matters if
they don't support XML Schema validation.)

Any suggestions?