My client program is sending a gzip-ed http request, which is decompressed by the mod-deflate InputFilter in Apache. This works when I am using mod-wsgi (without any custom configurations) to serve a django site that is receiving compressed requests. However, when I turn on daemon mode via the WSGIDaemonProcess directive, the django site begins receiving garbled requests which I interpret as the mod-deflate not being active. The error is 100% reproducible, and simply commenting out the WSGIDaemonProcess line makes everything work again.
Also, if you're wondering how I compress http requests for wsgi: My wsgi script changes the CONTENT-LENGTH to the appropriate post-decompression size before the request enters django.