Pythoncom shutdown problems

[Michael Porter]

"Hannes Grund" <grundhan at cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote in message
news:mailman.1059266799.22153.python-list at python.org...
> Dear all,
> probably offtopic for the general python list, but I don't know were to go
> else.
>
> I'm currently developing somekind of middleware
> wich makes heavy use of pythonwin/com extensions.
> (The complete setup is: win2000/winXP, python2.2,
> win32all-152, wxPython resp. wxWindows).
>
> The software is aimed to manage data held by a software
> suite (called chemoffice) to manage chemical substances.
> It exposes it main components via COM, the intagration
> to python via win32com.client.Dispatch works well.
> The problem:
>
> When calling a special method on some of these COM objects
> one component launches a process which appears to be a subprocess
> of svchost.exe.
> The result is that I'm unable to terminate the python process
> after this process has been started, furthermore if
> I shutdown the python process manually, it keeps alive, causing
> problems during windows shutdown (i.e. you have to remove
> it manually as well).
>
> Any help or hint would be highly appreciated,
>
> thanks in advance,
>   Hannes Grund
>

This may be unrelated, but I had a similar problem when using Python via COM
as a scripting language with the XMetal XML editor. In this case XMetal
would refuse to shut down after running one of my Python macros (the GUI
would disappear but the xmetal process would not close and would have to be
sutdown manually).

The solution in this case was to explicitly run the Python garbage collector
before shutdown by installing an Macro which did:

import gc
gc.collect()

Perhaps a similar thing might work for you?

Mike.