Ctrl-C crashes Python after importing scipy.stats

Question

I\'m running 64-bit Python 2.7.3 on Win7 64-bit. I can reliably crash the Python interpreter by doing this:

>>> from scipy import stats
>>>         


        

Answer 1

I have been able to get a half-workaround by doing this:

from scipy import stats
import win32api
def doSaneThing(sig, func=None):
    return True
win32api.SetConsoleCtrlHandler(doSaneThing, 1)

Returning true in the handler stops the chain of handlers so that the meddling Fortran handler is no longer called. However, this workaround is only partial, for two reasons:

1. It does not actually raise a KeyboardInterrupt, meaning that I can't react to it in Python code. It just drops me back to the prompt.
2. It doesn't fully interrupt things in the way that Ctrl-C normally does in Python. If in a fresh Python session I do a time.sleep(3) and hit Ctrl-C, the sleep is immediately aborted and I get a KeyboardInterrupt. With the above workaround, the sleep is not aborted, and control returns to the prompt only after the sleep time is up.

Nonetheless, this is still better than crashing the whole session. To me this raises the question of why SciPy (and any other Python libraries that rely on these Intel libraries) don't do this themselves.

I'm leaving this answer unaccepted in the hope that someone can provide a real solution or workaround. By "real" I mean that pressing Ctrl-C during a long-running SciPy calculation should work just like it does when SciPy is not loaded. (Note that this doesn't mean it has to work immediately. Non-SciPy calculations like plain Python sum(xrange(100000000)) may not immediately abort on Ctrl-C, but at least when they do, they raise a KeyboardInterrupt.)