Access violation when embedding Python on Windows

I need help understanding why embedded Python is crashing in this extremely simple test case on Windows.

This works great:

#ifdef _DEBUG
#undef _DEBUG
#include <Python.h>
#define _DEBUG
#endif

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    Py_Initialize();
    std::cout << "Hello world!" << std::endl;
    PyRun_SimpleString("print(\"Hello world!\")");
    return 0;
}

This crashes with an access violation:

#ifdef _DEBUG
#undef _DEBUG
#include <Python.h>
#define _DEBUG
#endif

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    Py_Initialize();
    std::cout << "Hello world!" << std::endl;
    std::cout << Py_GetPythonHome() << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

My research has led me here. I determined that my python installation (2.6.5) is compiled to use msvcr90.dll and the embedding program uses msvcr100.dll.

The first thing that grabbed my attention was that Py_GetPythonHome() surely checks environment variables, one of the flagged problems of having multiple MS C runtimes used in a single application. However according to the MSDN example, I should only expect the environment variable values to be out of synch, not to c开发者_如何学运维ause an access violation.

Please help me understand!