Python Program runs but itself but does not run under IDLE

[Ollie]

I am trying to figure out how a complex program written in python
works.  I am new to python so looking at the source code directly is
not helping me much.  As such, I am running the program under IDLE so
I can step through the code.

The program runs fine when it is run by itself.  However, when I try
to run the program in IDLE, I run into problems were a module cannot
be found or is unavailable.   To work around this problem I tired to
place the location of required modules in the PYTHONPATH envrio
variable.  This solved some of the import failures but resulted in the
following error:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SynchronizedObject'

I also tried capturing the contents of sys.path when the program ran
by itself.  I then hard coded this information into the program.  This
time when I ran the program in IDLE, I did not run into any import
failures or lost attributes but it did result in the following error:

NotImplementedError: font module not available

What am I doing that is preventing me from running this program in
IDLE?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Cheers,
Ollie