Strange Problem with pythonw.exe

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/9/2012 10:23 AM, asa at vorsicht-bissig.de wrote:
> Hello subscribers,
>
> I've recently encountered a strange problem with Python for Windows.
> I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit and Python 3.2.3 64 Bit (also tried 32
> bit). The Problem is, that pythonw.exe does not work at all!
> Therefore no IDLE for me... But python.exe runs just fine. I ran
> Process Monitor, which showed some activity for pythonw.exe, but no
> window is coming up.

It is not quite clear what you did here, but if you just run 
pythonw.exe, you should not see anything, as the 'w' stands for 
'Windows', 'windowless', or 'with user interaction through a gui brought 
up by the python program being run'. It make it hard to debug if no gui 
is being brought up.

> The problem isn't restricted to my main python
> installation. I have also tried running portable python and active
> state python. No pythonw.exe of them is working. Reinstallation
> didn't change anything. Windows firewall was deactivated, no
> difference. No firewall-software or any possibilities of blocking
> pythonw.exe. I couldn't find the problem online. My problem was
> triggered by using PyQt. I've loaded an .ui, which did NOT show up. I
> have Ne ver seen IDLE since that "crash". Advice anyone?

I take it that IDLE *did* work before using PyQT. If this is correct (I 
must admit, I hope so), I would ask the author of PyQT whether it or QT 
does anything to the system that could persist across installs. The most 
likely change to me would be in the registry. So if it were my machine, 
I would fire up regedit, back up the registry, search it for 'pythonw', 
look at the results, and perhaps delete all pythonw entries.
Then reinstall the core component. You might also try 3.3.0a4, which had 
additional bug fixes, or go back to something like 3.2.0.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy