[Guido]
It's not Mark's fault, it's Microsoft's fault. If you don't do things the way MS wants you to, experienced Windows users will gripe, misunderstand what you do, etc. [Tim] Something just occurred to me: MS's guidelines aren't arbitrary, they actually have very good reasons. In the case of putting all an app's crucial info in the Registry, it's the only way to allow a site administrator to set policy and site options remotely (an admin can fiddle other machines' registries remotely). This works very well indeed when there's only "one copy" of an app on a machine (or at most one copy "per user").
And actually, the business about separate subtrees for the machine's configuration and the user's configuration is pretty clever. MS doesn't explain it well, and it gets misused, but when done right, it's a lot simpler than the maze of .xxxrc files you sometimes find in other OSes.
What just occurred to me is that JimA is concerned with *not* letting any info from a previously-installed Python affect the app he's installing. Similarly, Gordon's Win32 "standalone installer" modifies python.exe and pythonw.exe to use a PYTHONPATH he forces, leaving the registry out of it. Similarly, the woes I've had in trying to sell Python as a general Win32 scripting tool at work mostly boil down to that there's no effortless way to do it that doesn't risk picking up info from-- or forcing info onto --pre-existing or future distinct Python installations (in contrast, Perl "just works" in this respect).
In my Linux version, I went to the heart of the matter - getpath.c. It occurs to me that getpath.c might do better to follow a normal bootstrap process - ie, create the absolute minimal sys.path required to go to the next step. Then the rest of what goes on in getpath.c could be written in Python. Maybe that Python code needs to get frozen in (to prevent bozos from destroying an installation by stepping on getpath.py), but it would make it a lot easier to create independent installations, and also reduce the variations between platforms at the C level. (Then again, I've never heard of anyone stepping on exceptions.py.) If some registry manipulation primitives were exposed (say, through ntpath) that would mean that Windows developers could (if they wanted) play by the MS rules with at least the option of not stepping on each other. - Gordon