Command line prompt broken on XP with Python 2.5 - help!

[Endless Story]

On Feb 16, 10:29 am, Tim Golden <m... at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> I would ask if you had *any* other Python installation
> -- say a cygwin one -- which might just be getting in the way?

It's a cygwin problem, guddammit. I was wondering if this might be the
case - I should have mentioned in my initial post that I've got a
whole Cygwin setup, including Python.

I know the conflict is the problem because just now I opened up a
command shell in XP (not the Cywgin bash window), and instead of
typing "python" and getting nothing, I tried "which python" - which
when you think about it, shouldn't even work in a XP shell. But
somehow Cygwin is mingling some of its capabilities with the XP shell,
because "which python" actually gets an answer - "/usr/bin/python,"
which is Cygwin.

Now the question is how to fix this - I don't want to uninstall the
Cygwin version. Instead I need some way of unknotting Cygwin's
intrusion into what should be an XP-only shell, or else a way of
giving priority when in that shell (and not the bash shell, which I
also use) to the Python executable residing at C:\Python25.