On my system (Windows Server 2008 SP1 - 64-bit, Python 2.5.2 - 32-bit),
simple actions like:
>>> help(help) # Or any function
or
>>> import tempfile
>>> f = tempfile.mktemp()
result in this (rather confusing) error:
TypeError: _getfullpathname() argument 1 must be (buffer overflow), not str

Apparently, _getfullpathname() chokes on certain paths if they are not
supplied as unicode. Locally, I was able to work around the issue by
changing the call to _getfullpathname in ntpath.abspath to:
                path = str(_getfullpathname(unicode(path)))