I'll be happy to help in whatever way would be useful in dealing with the "raised bar," as the prospect of having Python support on all platforms for bz2 compression (and tarfiles) is very appealing.
If you could get Python from CVS, build it with MSVC 6.0 for Windows (elaborate instructions are in PCBuild/readme.txt!!!), and see if the bz2 module works on all flavors of Windows to which you have access, that would be tremendously helpful IMO.
If MSVC 7.0 isn't at least as good, I'll find a machine which still has 6.0 on it (or reinstall it on one of our development systems), but I pulled down the sources from CVS and built it with MSC++ 7 and the all 28 tests in the bz2 test suite pass on both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Should I dig up a MSC6 system, or is this just as good?
More testing is always welcome; if you could test-drive the instructions in PCbuild/readme.txt for Tcl/Tk and Sleepycat Berkeley DB on multiple platforms that would be super. I have understood (from Tim, again) that we can't upgrade to MSVC 7.0, because the runtime is incompatible in some places, and we don't want to break existing add-on distributions that are compiled with 6.0 -- not every open source developer can afford to upgrade. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)