Way back when I installed SQLalchemy 0.3.3 in such a way that it wound up in .../site-packages/easy-install.pth: ... ./SQLAlchemy-0.3.3-py2.4.egg ... A colleague installed a later version in a different directory, referenced that in PYTHONPATH but still got the old version: udesktop116% PYTHONPATH=/opt/tradelink/research/site-packages.beta python -c 'import sqlalchemy ; print sqlalchemy.__file__' /opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.3.3-py2.4.egg/sqlalchemy/__init__.pyc udesktop116% ls /opt/tradelink/research/site-packages.beta BeautifulSoup.py _mssql.so pylab.py Cython configobj.py pylab.pyc IPython dateutil pymssql.py Jinja-1.2-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg docutils-0.4-py2.4.egg pymssql.pyc PIL easy-install.pth pyparsing.py PIL.pth enthought pytz Pygments-0.10-py2.4.egg fpconst.py pyximport Pyrex fpconst.pyc research SOAPpy lib scipy SQLAlchemy-0.5.0rc3dev_r5205-py2.4.egg matplotlib timeseries Sphinx-0.3-py2.4.egg mpl_toolkits tlsec Symbide-0.3.1-py2.4.egg numpy __init__.py pyExcelerator Looking at sys.path shows why: PYTHONPATH=/opt/tradelink/research/site-packages.beta python -c 'import sys ; print sys.path' ['', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/zope.interface-3.3.0-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pycrypto-2.0.1-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/magnitude-0.9.3-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c7-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/paramiko-1.7.2-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/processing-0.52-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pp-1.5.4-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/greenlet-0.1-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/MDP-2.3-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/hashlib-20060408a-py2.4-solaris-2.10-i86pc.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/nose-0.10.3-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/coverage-2.85-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/daemon-1.0.1-py2.4.egg', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.3.3-py2.4.egg', '/opt/tradelink/research/site-packages.beta', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python24.zip', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/plat-sunos5', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/lib-tk', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/lib-dynload', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/3rdParty', '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/3rdParty/Numeric'] The beta site-packages directory does indeed appear ahead of the normal site-packages, but the contents of easy-install.pth are all ahead of that. In my opinion they should be inserted right before the directory in which their .pth file was found. Why is this not the case? In case it's a setuptools/easy_install thing, I'm using setuptools 0.6c7 with Python 2.4.5. Thanks, Skip