I've actually got a better diagnosis & fix to this problem with loading templates (and possibly other problems on windows machines). I've made two tickets on kid's tracwiki to address this, and updated http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/ModPythonIntegration to show the needed fix to the PROJECTNAME_start.py.
In this case the problem is that my templates are on the D:\ drive in windows, and a revision of kid (r.173 (part of 0.8)) added a TemplatePath() (kid.path) which forgot about windows paths. This means that if your template is not on your C:\ drive then TemplatePath() won't be able to find it (and worse will go into an infinite loop - see kid ticket http://lesscode.org/projects/kid/ticket/110). The fix is really easy - just add kid.path.insert("path-to-your-turbogearsproject") to your PROJECTNAME_start.py. I've added this to the wiki page http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/ModPythonIntegration and made a similar documentation ticket to kid (http://lesscode.org/projects/kid/ticket/111). It might be worth looking at other "some windows machines" problems to see if they have a similar path-issue. It __might__ be worth updating the main mod-python documentation to include this.
