Many third-party Python modules have an attribute which holds the version information for the module (usually something like module.VERSION or module.__version__), however some do not.
Particular examples of such modules are libxslt and libxml2.
I need to check that the correct version of these modules are being used at runtime. Is there a way to do this?
A potential solution wold be to read in the source at runtime, hash it, and then compare it to the hash of the known version, but that's nasty. 
Is there a better solutions?
Some ideas:

Try checking for functions that exist or don't exist in your needed versions.
If there are no function differences, inspect function arguments and signatures.
If you can't figure it out from function signatures, set up some stub calls at import time and check their behavior.
Checking a Python module version at runtime