I just noticed a weird traceback in test_winreg. When I import test.autotest on Windows, I get a "test failed" notice for test_winreg. When I run it by itself the test succeeds. But when I first import test.autotest and then import test.test_winreg (which should rerun the latter, since test.regrtest unloads all test modules after they have run), I get an AttributeError telling me that 'None' object has no attribute 'get'. This is in encodings.__init__.py in the first call to _cache.get() in search_function. Somehow this is called by SetValueEx() in WriteTestData() in test/test_winreg.py. But inspection of the encodings module shows that _cache is {}, not None, and the source shows no evidence of how this could have happened.

I may have sounded confused: the problem is not caused by the reload(). The test fails the first time around when run by test.autotest. My suspicion is that another test somehow overwrites encodings._cache? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)