[Idle-dev] disappearing IDLE menu items under Win98

[Guido van Rossum]

> I downloaded and did a full install of python 2.0 under Windows 98 for the
> first time yesterday. Everything appeared to work, except whenever I brought
> up any of the menus (file, edit, debug, etc)  the menu items disappeared
> after about half a second. I would click on "file", the menu would appear,
> the menu items would appear, the menu items would disappear. If I ran my
> cursor over the invisible menu items they would reappear and stay reappeared
> for as long as I had that menu open. The menu items work, it's just that I
> annoyingly can't see them.
> 
> I am running Windows 98. I download python 2.0 for win32 from pythonlabs.com
> and installed it in c:\progra~1\python20. It didn't work.
> I edited my autoexec.bat as the docs said to. didnt work.
> I downloaded the newest Tcl/Tk, installed that. IDLE still didnt work right.
> I  uninstalled 2.0 and downloaded Python 2.1a1 and installed that. It didn't
> fix the problem.
> I searched the website and newsgroups for instances of other people having
> this problem. I didn't find anything.
> I'm not quite sure what else to do, being new to python (though I have done
> some programming before)
> 
> This maybe doesn't seem quite the right mailinglist to post this problem to,
> but it seemed to be the best out of the ones that I saw.
> 
> Can anybody help me?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Shawn Zilbert

I haven't seen any responses to this, and I can't reproduce this on my
own Win98 machine -- IDLE works great, with all mentioned versions of
Python, including menus!

Based on past trouble reports, it's very likely that *something* in
your Win98 installation is hosed.  In true Microsoft vein, I can only
recommend to reinstall Windows98 (or better, upgrade to Linux :-).

Seriously, most likely another application, tool or utility that you
have installed interferes with the graphics request by Python via
Tcl/Tk.  It's impossible for someone to help you with that without
access to your computer.  Try installing Python on somebody else's
computer running the same OS -- if it works there, see which
applications (etc.) you have installed that they haven't.

It's Windows, so it must be buggy...

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)