Under certain conditions (sometimes triggered by the test suite),

"from xml.parsers import expat" succeeds but the imported expat module
is an empty shell.  Make sure we don't be fooled by that.

Lib/xmlrpclib.py

@@ -361,6 +361,8 @@ def handle_entityref(self, entity):
 
 try:
     from xml.parsers import expat
+    if not hasattr(expat, "ParserCreate"):
+        raise ImportError, "ParserCreate"
 except ImportError:
     ExpatParser = None
 else: