I am an agreeance with the original report.  I just finished writing an
automated test that did the following to work around this behavior:

 	46	        # Sometimes an exception happens during exit, try to make
sure we get   
 	47	        # a non_zero exit code. 
 	48	        old_exitfunc = sys.exitfunc 
 	49	        def exitfunc(): 
 	50	            try: 
 	51	                old_exitfunc() 
 	52	            except SystemExit: 
 	53	                raise 
 	54	            except: 
 	55	                raise SystemExit(1)