IDLE; Pythonwin and windows network drives

[Tuure Laurinolli]

Some time ago I was playing with the idea of using an actual IDE to 
write my python code. I first played with IDLE, but noticed that it was 
kind of limited and for some reason it worked extremely slowly when 
started from a shortcut on desktop(not so when started from shortcut in 
start menu).

Then I tried Pythonwin and noticed that it didn't provide any 
indentation help at all - to my surprise. I discarded the idea of using 
it, but for some reason tried it again later - only to find indentation 
working just fine.

A bit of research revealed that the problem was caused by opening a file 
residing on a network drive. How strange.

Some more research and the problem became apparent. When python opened 
the file and windows code took over python code, it silently changed the 
locale to "the right locale", which happens to use , as decimal 
delimiter instead of the "standard" . So when pythonwin(or IDLE, they 
use the same indentation code) tried to convert a string into float into 
int in order to find the line I was on(strange Tkinter stuff), it 
promptly raised an exception because "19.3" obviously wasn't a float - 
it contained strange characters!

A dive into python source shows that when python locale is normally set 
through appropriate module, it preserves the LC_NUMEERIC locale as the 
standard C to ensure correct handling of floating point values and only 
sets the user-defined locale for the module-specific functions that 
actually make use of it(and resets it back to C-locale whenever user 
changes the locale).

Also, Pythonwin and IDLE must use some truly wondrous way to open files 
which triggers this behavior, standard open() didn't change anything.

Forgive any mad-rambling-like qualities of this post, It's late (or 
early, if you will), and I'm nearly asleep already.