Norton AV 2001 + popen + WinMe = crash

[Tim Peters]

[Kirby Urner]
> So how does IDLE invoke the browser if not with popen and if
> it uses popen, then why can't I from the IDLE shell?  The kind
> of question that keeps me up at night.

[David Bolen]
> At least this can be answered by looking at the source, and let you
> get some sleep :-)
>
> It looks like IDLE uses either the standard library webbrowser module
> (2.1+) or some internal browser support in the BrowserControl.py
> module (2.0) to launch the browser.
>
> Under Windows, this is accomplished using the ShellExecute() win32 api
> call (in 2.0 via the win32api module, or via the os.startfile()
> library function in 2.1+).
>
> So there's no popen() involved.

Almost all correct.  Thanks, David!  The 2.0 truth is hairier than it looks,
because win32api doesn't ship with the base Python distribution:  2.0 also
uses webbrowser and os.startfile(), and indeed the latter function was
introduced at the last second for 2.0 precisely so that IDLE wouldn't have
to use MS popen().