Python logging.fileConfig() weirdness

I wrote a draft of a python application that I intended to turn into a Windows service. In it, I used the logging standard module and the fileConfig() function to configure up multiple log handlers and other cool logging related things. All of that worked great when run as a simple script on a Windows box.

When I wrapped up the functionality in a Windows service, however, the logging killed the service almost immediately with a "Bad File Descriptor" IOError exception being raised. I tried quite a lot of things to get it to work again but to no avail.

In the end, I replaced logging.fileConfig() with logging.basicConfig() and lo and behold it worked again. I don't know why it worked. Searching with Google yielded a few things about "atexit" on Windows or some such peculiarity. I don't care because my app. works again.

I'm pretty steamed with the logging module for wasting my afternoon. (I'm actually grateful to have such a wonderful module in the standard library at all.)