Python2.4 on Win32 suddenly started crashing last night

[Tim Chase]

I'm not sure if this is some Win32 update that was silently applied
by our netadmin, but when I simply "import socket" at the command
line, it's crashing (with the "Do you want to send this information
to Microsoft" debug/crash dialog).

It was working as of last night, and to the best of my knowledge,
nothing was changed on the system.  It took a while to track it
down, but it came from importing smtplib which in turn imports socket.

I've tried "import socket" and it crashes, but then tried importing
each of the modules that are imported in socket.py and nothing dies:

C:\Program Files\Python24\Lib>python
Python 2.4.3 (#69, Mar 29 2006, 17:35:34) [MSC v.1310 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import _socket
>>> from _socket import *
>>> import _ssl
>>> from _ssl import *
>>> import os, sys
>>> from errno import EBADF
>>> sys.platform
'win32'
>>> import socket
[win32 crash happens here]


Does anybody have any hints?  I'm unfortunately somewhat bound to
2.4 due to some external binary libraries that we're tied to.

Thanks,

-tkc