Idle won't start - Update

[David MacQuigg]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 17:20:42 GMT, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 06:27:12 -0700, David MacQuigg <dmq at gain.com>
>declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:
>
>> This is getting scary.  I want my computer back !!.  I'll try a
>> complete system restore.
>> 
>> That works.  Python is happy.  Sigh !!!
>>
>	I was about to suggest checking either autoexec.bat (W9x) or the
>registry (via "My Computer/properties/advanced/environment variables")
>(NT) for some left-overs defining a TCL path...

IDLE has been working smoothly since banning Ruby from my system --
until today.  The symptoms are as usual - click on the IDLE icon and
you see an hour glass for about 30 seconds - then nothing.

I tried closing all other applications - same problem.

With the Task Manager, I see about 8 pythonw.exe processes running!!
I killed them all.  Now things seem back to normal.

The only thing I can think of that has been unusual in the last few
days is that I have been running IDLE simultaneously with Python from
the command line, and doing some testing in both windows of
computations involving illegal floating-point numbers ( inf and nan ).
This does not cause a crash, or anything beyond the usual traceback in
python.

I noticed that when I start Python from a command line, I get one
process (python.exe) in the Task Manager.  When I start Python using
IDLE, I get two processes (both named pythonw.exe).

I tried starting and closing multiple copies of IDLE.  This seems to
leave some zombie 'pythonw.exe' processes still alive.  Another
strange phenomenon - I always get two more 'pythonw.exe' processes
with each start of IDLE, but sometimes I get an extra window, and
sometimes not.  Closing the extra windows leaves one more
'pythonw.exe' than when I started, so they do accumulate.

-- Dave