Trapping the segfault of a subprocess.Popen

[Pierre GM]

All,

I need to run a third-party binary from a python script and retrieve
its output (and its error messages). I use something like
>>> process = subprocess.Popen(options, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> (info_out, info_err) = process.communicate()
That works fine, except that the third-party binary in question
doesn't behave very nicely and tend to segfaults without returning any
error. In that case, `process.communicate` hangs for ever.

I thought about calling a `threading.Timer` that would call
`process.terminate` if `process.wait` doesn't return after a given
time... But it's not really a solution: the process in question can
sometimes take a long time to run, and I wouldn't want to kill a
process still running.
I also thought about polling every x s and stopping when the result of
a subprocess.Popen(["ps","-p",str(initialprocess.pid)],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE) becomes only the header line, but my script
needs to run on Windows as well (and no ps over there)...

Any suggestion welcome,
Thx in advance
P.