So the original motivation here was to piggyback on SIGINT in order to do something like this on Windows: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/132058/showing-the-stack-trace-from-a-running-python-application

I've given Tim's patch a shot and I see that I've been barking up the wrong tree.  I agree that this one-liner is a kinda invasive change and probably isn't worth putting in a point release.  Thanks for the help.