idle BUG

[Tim Peters]

[Robin Becker]
> I think this must be a bug in Tkinter, but since no one ever responds I
> thought I'd whine about idle instead.

See

http://sf.net/tracker/?group_id=5470&atid=105470&func=detail&aid=216289

> I run python2.1 Win95 OSR2.
> Start a command window
> run python idle.py
>
> Kill the idle window using the mouse (click on the x). In some unknown
> percentage of cases (like 50%) the process hangs and doesn't return to
> the command window.
>
> The hung process is very destructive and makes it impossible to reboot
> the machine properly. This bug has been present for a very long time
> and I'm fed up with it.

Use pythonw instead.  Then it doesn't hang.  Nobody knows how to fix it, or
even what causes it (follow the link).

> It's clearly some kind of race between python and Tcl/Tk.

Fredrik Lundh has provoked the same problems with pure Tcl/Tk apps run from
a wish shell -- no Python components involved.  That is, there's no reason
to believe Tkinter or Python have anything to do with this.

> The problem doesn't occur on win2k so I guess there's some
> difference between the run times that helps.

Win9x suffers many flaky behaviors related to consoles and processes.
pythonw appears to avoid the hangup problems simply by getting the console
window out of the equation.  Without MS's source code at hand, I doubt we'll
ever get a deeper understanding than that.