import site fails - Please Help

[Helmut Jarausch]

Hi, I'm completely puzzled and I hope someone
can shed some light on it.

After cloning a running system, booting the new machine from a rescue CD,
chroot to the new root partition, I get the following strange error
from python upon startup

python -v
> import site failed
....
st= os.stat(path)
stat() argument 1 must be encoded string without NULL bytes, not str

So, what's broken? How can I get out what 'path' contained at this
moment?

Many thanks for your help,
Helmut.