Python2.4 on Win32 suddenly started crashing last night

[MRAB]

On 13/09/2012 13:42, Tim Chase wrote:
> 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.
>
I've just downloaded, installed and tested Python 2.4.4. No crash.

This is with Windows XP Pro (32-bit).