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

[Steve Holden]

Endless Story wrote:
> 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.
> 
It sounds like you may have mistakenly added Cygwin binary directories 
to your Windows path. This isn't normally necessary, since the Cygwin 
shell makes all necessary path adjustments as it starts.

regards
  Steve
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