Idle won't start

[Rob Hawkins]

John Matthews wrote:

>I have similar problems at my office machine (Win2K Pro) and my home 
>machine (WinXP). I do not, nor have ever had Ruby installed. The problem 
>seems intermittent. I gave up and went back to Python 2.2. I hated to go 
>back because the 2.3 version of IDLE was nice, but I beleive that it is 
>somehow broken and will need to be fixed for me to use it again.
>
>John
>  
>
I'm a brand-new Python user, and spent several hours with a somewhat 
similar problem. I'm running Python 2.3 on Windows XP Home (SP1). When I 
first installed from the Windows binary, IDLE would not run from the 
shortcut that was created by the installer. Double-clicking created a 
new process in Task Manager, but no window ever opened. When logging 
off  I'd get a message saying that an application was refusing to shut 
down. Unfortunately, I can't recall the exact message--something about a 
menu I think.

I found that the shortcut for IDLE  was set up to start the Python EXE 
with idle.pyw as an argument (along with the full path). I changed the 
shortcut to simply point directly to idle.pyw and IDLE started working. 
Now I'm back to reading the Python tutorial and doing "2+2" in IDLE!

Probably not the same problem, but perhaps it might help.

Rob