[Gordon]
Much as I love Mark's stuff (and hesitate to criticize crazy Aussies), I wish there weren't so much special casing here for Windows.
[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.
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"). 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). IOW, the three of us find getting path info out of the registry intolerable because we are in fact trying to do the opposite of what the registry mechanism was *designed* for: we want perfect isolation, not perfect sharing. This has come up on Python-Help a few times too, in the guise of someone installing a product that in turn installs an older version of Python, which in turn confuses another product that relies on features in a newer version of Python. So while the traditional Windows .ini file (like Unix this-or-that.rc file) model was replaced by the registry for excellent reasons, those reasons don't apply to the way we're using Python! The .ini file model was exactly right for what most of us seem to want to do, and the registry model is exactly wrong. just-thought-i'd-cheer-you-up<wink>-ly y'rs - tim