Lesson learned: kids should not be allowed to use API's starting
with an underscore :-/
zipimport in 2.3a1 is even more broken than I thought: I attemped
to _PyString_Resize a string created by PyString_FromStringAndSize,
which fails for strings with length 0 or 1 since the latter returns
an interned string in those cases. This would cause a SystemError
with empty source files (and no matching pyc) in the zip archive.
I rewrote the offending code to simply allocate a new buffer and
avoid _PyString_Resize altogether.
Added a test that would've caught the problem.