I committed the fix. Thanks for testing, Roger.

As for the change in semantics, I'm fully aware it is not backwards-compatible. Unfortunately the incorrect usage was not even discovered until I started my bootstrap work because the import statement does the right thing but __import__() itself was never updated so it is only noticeable if you never updated your code to use importlib.import_module() which has been the preferred way to programmatically import code since Python 2.7/3.1. Plus the correct semantics are documented in PEP 328 (http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0328/) and referenced in the language spec (http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-import-statement) so I'm not going to change it back since this brings the function more in line with expectations. And since the fix is as simple as a try/except and two import calls then it falls within the realm of having to fix code for any new Python release.

And as for the crash, I will have a look.