<p>A reliable coder friend told me that Python's current multi-threading implementation is seriously buggy - enough to avoid using altogether.  What can said about this rumor?</p>

I've used it in several applications and have never had nor heard of threading being anything other than 100% reliable, as long as you know its limits.  You can't spawn 1000 threads at the same time and expect your program to run properly on Windows, however you can easily write a worker pool and just feed it 1000 operations, and keep everything nice and under control.