Tkinter, IDLE keeps crashing

[Ned Deily]

In article <nad-9C8F8C.14022517022013 at news.gmane.org>,
 Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> In article <9d367487-4846-4caa-85e7-08ac570b4a6c at googlegroups.com>,
>  Ash Courchene <ash.courchene at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So I've actually had this problem for awhile, and I cant seem to get 
> > anything 
> > to work. I've followed all the steps & procedures that my google searches 
> > have provide me, but I can't seem to get the Tkinter module or the Python 
> > IDLE IDE to work.
> > 
> > For instance, if I click IDLE on my mac, it'll open up for a quick sec & 
> > produce an error.
> > Or if I go into the Python interpreter, I import Tkinter, call Tk()
> > Then it says: CGColor 1 components Abort Trap: 6, then get an error. I'll 
> > post this crash report below.
> > 
> > My system is a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
> > I'm running 2.7.3 Python
> > I've installed the recommended version of ActiveState TCL/TK
> 
> Most likely you have a non-default preference set (color or font) that 
> is causing the problem.  IDLE and especially Tk on OS X has been known 
> to be vulnerable to this.  To try working around it, open a terminal 
> session and rename the IDLE settings directory:
> 
> cd $HOME
> mv .idlerc idlerc-disabled
> 
> Then try relaunching IDLE.  If that solves it, it would be nice if you 
> could open an issue on the Python bug tracker (http://bugs.python.org) 
> and attach to it the contents of the config files in the old 
> idlerc-disabled directory.  There has been some fixes to IDLE since 
> 2.7.3 to make it more resilient; those will be in 2.7.4 which should be 
> coming along in the near future.

Following up to myself: I skipped over the second part of your problem. 
Sorry about that!

My suggestion above would apply to IDLE but would not explain why 
calling Tk() directly outside of IDLE would crash, of course.  That 
sounds more like a strictly Tk problem.  I suggest trying to eliminate 
Python from the equation by bringing up the A/S Tk wish shell:

  /usr/local/bin/wish8.5

and then trying to run some of the widget demos from its File menu.  If 
wish also fails, you probably should ask on one of the Tcl/Tk forums, 
like the tcl-mac mailing list:

   tcl-mac at lists.sourceforge.net 
or http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.tcl.mac

What kind of Mac are your running on and do you have any unusual color 
settings or third-party extensions installed?

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org