Can Python be run off of a CD-ROM?

[Peter Hansen]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> 
> win32all is growing in a direction where it makes fewer use of the
> registry than in the past, and the sandbox py2exe is already able to
> create frozen com servers which work fine with python23.dll in the
> executable directory, so I assume somewhere in the future Python
> releases don't need dlls in the system directory anymore.

Technically, no release since at least 2.0 has required DLLs in
the system directory, but it has taken some work (growing less by
the release) to make that possible.  We've used a shared network
installation of Python for each release from 2.0 on, with only 
minor tweaking.  

Initially we had to move the DLLs manually from the installation 
machine's SYSTEM directory to the network drive.  Now the non-admin
option resolves that issue.

win32all is for us the only remaining issue.  We need to include
a .pth file with two or three paths in it (even though the package
installs itself under site-packages now!).  We also still need to
set up a sitecustomize.py file which does imports on pythoncom and
pywintypes, or an import of win32api (for example) will fail.
I don't recall the explanation, but without first importing those
(or perhaps just one?) modules you can't import the win32 stuff,
but if they have been imported first, then it works fine.

Details/help supplied to those with troubles doing this, on request...

-Peter