Unusual minidom behaviour

[Victor Bazarov]

Hi,

If I am violating some rules by asking a question that has been
asked and answered before, please forward me to FAQ or to a web
page/site...  I have searched the news archives and can't seem
to find anything relevant.

I am running a fairly complex system written in Python by using
'exec' method from a Java application.  The trouble that I face
is that the application (multi-threaded) unpredictably hangs in
the minidom's "parse(filename)" function (I figured that by
adding "trace" printouts to the Python code.  The most puzzling
fact is that the hang-up happens not every time I run, and it
never happens if I run the same system from a command line.

Additional information: if I introduce enough debug print-outs
to the system's files, it seems to behave more stably.  If I run
the Java application under a debugger (even without stopping at
any breakpoints), everything seems fine.  My colleagues called
the situation "maybe there's a race condition".  Could it be
minidom has problems multi-tasking?

More additional information: I first encountered it with Python
2.0, upgrading to Python 2.1 didn't change a thing.  This all is
on Windows 2000 Pro.  The file it needs to parse exists and is
not locked.

I have not tried the same system on a different OS.  I will, I
have to.  Next week, for sure.

I would be grateful for any, no matter how crazy, suggestion.

Thank you for reading.

Victor
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