subprocess: reading from stdout hangs process termination, waiting for ENTER keyboard signal

[giohappy]

Hello everyone.
I'm trying to use subprocess module to launch a Windows console
application. The application prints some results to standard output
and then waits for the user to press any key to terminte. I can't
control this behaviour, as the application is not mine...
I'm stuck at the very first lines of my code. I'm trying to force
process termination (even with proc.terminate()), and it works only if
I don't read from stdout. If I do proc.stdout.read() the process
hangs, and I have to manually press the keyboard to interrupt it.
Probably it's due a low-level handle that is kept on the process
stdout, waiting for the keypress event...

How can I solve it?
Giovanni

------- Code excerpt-------

proc = subprocess.Popen('the_app.exe',
                       shell=True,
                       stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                       )
#stdout_value = proc.communicate()[0]
stdout_value = proc.stdout.read()
PROCESS_TERMINATE = 1
handle = win32api.OpenProcess(PROCESS_TERMINATE, False, proc.pid)
win32api.TerminateProcess(handle, -1)
win32api.CloseHandle(handle)
print stdout_value