Tkinter, IDLE keeps crashing

[Ned Deily]

In article <b12df7c4-1daa-41af-98aa-14915e100f80 at googlegroups.com>,
 Ash Courchene <ash.courchene at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe I have a MacBook Pro.2.4 GHz Intel Core i5.
> I dont think I have any weird color settings or 3rd party extensions... How 
> can I tell exactly??

By finding the one that crashes Tk - yeah, I know that's not very 
helpful.  But, more seriously, have you tried running 
/usr/local/bin/wish8.5?  If Tk crashes there when running the widget 
demos, then at least Python is not a factor.

The only vaguely potentially relevant hardware factor I can think of is 
whether or not the MacBook Pro has a Retina display.  The only standard 
settings that might be revlevant are those in System Preferences -> 
Language & Text, prinarily what Input Source is selected.

Another thing you could try is to temporarily disable the ActiveState 
Tcl/Tk and see what happens with calling Tk in python and with IDLE 
then.   They will automatically fall back to using the Apple-supplied 
Tcl/Tk 8.5.x in 10.7 which is older and buggier than A/S 8.5.13 but 
should not crash immediately, either. The easiest way to do that is to 
use sudo from the terminal:

cd /Library/Frameworks/
sudo mv ./Tcl.framework ./Tcl-DISABLED
sudo mv ./Tk.framework ./Tk-DISABLED

When finished testing, you can restore them by:

cd /Library/Frameworks/
sudo mv ./Tcl-DISABLED ./Tcl.framework
sudo mv ./Tk-DISABLED ./Tk.framework

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org