I checked on another WinXP computer, and it works on this one - seems
that I have to play the windows re-install game, or hunt down what the
exact differences between these 2 WinXP computers are :-/...
The fact that only matplotlib exhibit this behavior is strange though, I
checked in the code (hence cc to the devel list) and the problem is
linked to an assert in the destructor of PythonExtensionBase, checking
that the ref counting of this object is 0 and exiting Python interpreter
if it is not the case...Hum, obviously I do not know the code at all,
but could the problem be linked to a destruction sequence beeing
somewhat different on my computer (for whatever reasons :-/)?
This worry me (in addition to bother me not beeing able to run
matplotlib on my laptop for the moment 
), cause it may be the sign
of "difficult to solve and reproduce" installation problems for a
package we may use in a distributed software package in the future...
I will keep investigating, but if there is a developer have any idea
about this (like, a hint about why there is this assert there and what
can cause it to fail), it would be great!
Thanks a lot, and congratulation for matplotlib, it looks the most
promising python plotting packages I have found yet! 