[Travis Miller]
thanks guys for all of your help. i will study these tips and attempt to implement them in hopes of catching what's going wrong. hopefully it was a fluke, but i'd surely feel more comfortable if it was reproducible.
I don't believe (much <wink>) in flukes: something went wrong. But it's "impossible" for this specific thing to go wrong, so there's little hope of determining the cause unless/until someone *can* reproduce it. There are known problems now with apps (including at least Zope 2.7.2's Publisher) that do a subtransaction commit, get some exception later, and close the database connection without first abort()'ing or commit()'ing the transaction containing the subtransaction commit. That can lead to all sorts of bizarre symptoms, and this *may* be one of them (I'm not certain either way). The Collector report I pointed you at was interesting in this respect because that poster did see other exceptions in the log near the time of "the impossible" PyBuild_Value complaint. Current 2.7 branch ZODB code does not allow apps to do that anymore (it was always "forbidden", but never enforced (or even detected) before), and Zope's Publisher has been changed to stop doing it, So if you do find yourself able to reproduce it, you *may* get cheap relief by trying the current 2.7 branch code.