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Much as I'd like this patch to be applied, I feel compelled to point out that it does have a significant(?) downside:  it slows down hashing of large integers to some degree.  

On my machine (Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz/SuSE Linux 10.2/gcc 4.1 with -O3), using timeit.timeit('hash(n)') to get timings, the new hash function takes 70% more time for 1000 digit integers, 20% longer for 100 digit integers, but has no measurable performance impact for small (int-sized) longs.  I don't know how significant this performance hit is in the larger scheme of things.

Mark