Pythonwin Browse PythonPath and Idle Path Browser shows different content

[Erik Frankenfeld]

Recently I had some problems using a library installed with distutils
(I believe the name is irrelevant, but it was pychart
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Yasushi_Saito/pychart/)

I noticed there is a significant difference between the way Pythonwin
and the IDLE GUI Path Browser displays the Python Path. Why this
difference?

Please see the differences below:

Pythonwin BrowsePath:
+ Standard Python Library
+ PythonWin
+ win32
+ win32com
   + pychart
   + pythoncom.py
   + win32com

The Idle GUI Path Browser shows this layout:
sys.path
  + c:\python22\tools\idle
  + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\Pythonwin
  + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\win32
  + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\win32\lib
  + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\
     + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\pychart
     + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\win32com
     + c:\python22\lib\site-packages\pythoncom.py

Path on disk is nice but in IDLE the pychart package and other
packages in the directory site-packages are actually shown here as I
would expect. Pythonwin displays a different layout which I would call
confusing.

Can anyone explain this difference or tell me what I've got wrong,
please?

Erik Frankenfeld