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

[Tim Golden]

Endless Story wrote:
> On Feb 16, 9:56 am, "Jim" <jscre... at compuserve.com> wrote:
>> On Feb 16, 5:52 am, "Endless Story" <usable.thou... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are you talking about the Environment Variables-->System Variable-->path?
>> You may want to right click on My Computer-->System Properties-->Advanced-->
>> Environment Variables-->System variables-->Path-->Edit.
>> And check to see if it's there, if not then add it.
> 
> I've already added the new python to my path in this fashion, but to
> no avail.
> 
> Besides, if it were a path problem in the usual sense, the symptom
> would be a message at the command line saying that "python" is not
> recognized. Since I don't get this message, it's not a typical path
> problem. What it is, I don't know - that's my quandry.
> 

I've certainly never seen anything like what you've described,
and I've had Python 2.5 installed and uninstalled on several
different machines (Win2k & WinXP). I would ask if you had
*any* other Python installation -- say a cygwin one -- which
might just be getting in the way? Are you an administrator on
the machine you're on? Sometimes (a while ago and with the
ActiveState distro rather than python.org one) it has been
known to cause problems if you're not. Do the previous
installations still work?

Clutching at straws, really.

TJG