If you'll face some problems with proj4 or gdal packages, post here, I'll try to help. I've spent countless days (>2 weeks) at work few months ago to get together, compile and use a few geo libraries to write quite complex geographical converter (and reading/writing/manipulating data with gdal can be a pain in the lower part of my back at times).

Edit: also, I don't know if anything changed during this time, but gdal could easily eat up hundreds of megabytes of RAM if used without caution, so if there are any python gdal bindings, be careful