Something changed recently, and now the Demo/embed programs are broken, e.g. % ./loop pass 2 Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix> Could not find platform dependent libraries Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:] 'import site' failed; use -v for traceback Segmentation fault (core dumped) The crash is happening in the second call to init_exceptions() (gdb) where #0 PyModule_GetDict (m=0x0) at Objects/moduleobject.c:40 #1 0x8075ea8 in init_exceptions () at Python/exceptions.c:1058 #2 0x8051880 in Py_Initialize () at Python/pythonrun.c:147 #3 0x80516db in main (argc=3, argv=0xbffffa34) at loop.c:28 because the attempt to import __builtin__ returns NULL. I don't have time right now to look any deeper, but I suspect that the crash may be due to changes in the semantics of PyImport_ImportModule() which now goes through __import__. I'm posting this in case someone with spare cycles can look at it. -Barry