Andrew> Or it can be fixed by not having the entire standard library at Andrew> the toplevel, but instead inside a single "stdlib" package. ... Andrew> The backwards compatibility problems probably means this isn't Andrew> feasible until Python 3.0, though :( Not necessarily. It has been proposed (more than once I think) that such a stdlib package could be created in parallel using symlinks. At its simplest, I think all you'd need would be a stdlib directory, a nearly empty __init__.py file and symlinks to all the current standard modules and packages. (The __init__.py file would take care of importing builtin modules.) I would choose a very short name for such a package ("std" seems best) even though it might create clashes because it will be used a lot. Skip