IDLE Problem in Windows XP

[Josiah Carlson]

Branden Smith <sumitsu at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am a teaching assistant for an introductory course at Georgia Tech
> which uses Python, and I have a student who has been unable to start
> IDLE on her Windows XP Home Edition machine. Clicking on the shortcut
> (or the program executable) causes the hourglass to appear momentarily
> (and the process to momentarily appear in the process monitor), but
> nothing happens thereafter.
...

> Does anyone have any ideas as to what might cause this problem? It shows
> up with both Python 2.4 and 2.3. Version 2.2 works as it should.

It is probably the socket issue.  To get past the socket issue,
according to the idle docs:

Running without a subprocess:

	If IDLE is started with the -n command line switch it will run in a
	single process and will not create the subprocess which runs the RPC
	Python execution server.  This can be useful if Python cannot create
	the subprocess or the RPC socket interface on your platform.  However,
	in this mode user code is not isolated from IDLE itself.  Also, the
	environment is not restarted when Run/Run Module (F5) is selected.  If
	your code has been modified, you must reload() the affected modules and
	re-import any specific items (e.g. from foo import baz) if the changes
	are to take effect.  For these reasons, it is preferable to run IDLE
	with the default subprocess if at all possible.



That is, have the student modify the shortcut to pass a '-n' argument 
(without the quotes) to the command.  If it works, great, if it doesn't,
a traceback would be helpful.

 - Josiah