From the python devlopment mailing list summary:

"This discussion also brought up the question of whether a .chm help file for the Windows distribution would be worth using instead of including the HTML distribution of the documentation as it stands now. It was agreed that it was a good thing to have since it allowed for better searching. Tim Peters also discovered the install went faster since it would not have to copy a ton of individual HTML files." Better searching would be nice, although we do provide searching on the web site. Faster installs would be nice, too. So I'm not proposing that we do this anytime soon, but that we keep this idea in the back of our heads. And if someone comes across a tool that maintains two forms of help files (html and cbm), please share that information. - Greg