On Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:42:29 +0200, ""Martin v. Löwis"" martin@v.loewis.de said:
Yes, but what I experienced is much worse - I was actually getting the 2.6.2 version of python26.dll due to shadowing, instead of the 2.6.3 version. Ah. Did you get a message "[TARGETDIR] exists. Are you sure you want to overwrite existing files?"
I may well have, but that wouldn't surprise me when doing an upgrade in place.
Ok, so I need to make the message more clear that this is an error, and that most likely you do not want to proceed. If this was an upgrade in place, the message would have read "This update will replace your existing [ProductLine] installation."
Well, I'm not at all sure that I saw the 'exists' message. That one is raised whenever the directory tree isn't empty?
The real problem, it seems, is there was a spurious python26.dll in c:\Python26, which shadowed the one in c:\Windows.
Not spurious. Most likely, your previous installation was "just for me"; in this case, it cannot install into system32.
Ah so! I think that is quite likely. I'm not a big Windows user and it took me a bit to realize the disadvantages of a 'just for me' installation on my netbook.
If you then do a "for all users" installation into the same location, you get the behavior that you observed: python26.dll gets installed to system32, and you end up with two copies of the DLL.
Is there a way to configure the installer so that if an 'all users' installation was being done, any python26.dll in c:\Python26 would be deleted? I'm surely not the only person who's going to run into this.
Thanks for the analysis.
-- KBK