IDLE has suddenly become FAWLTY - so should I be hitting it with a big stick, or what?

[Twirlip2]

On Wednesday, 27 August 2014 00:07:03 UTC+1, Chris Angelico  wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 4:01 AM, Twirlip2 <ahr... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I've been using IDLE with Python 3.4.0 on Windows XP (SP3), since March this year, and since May I've been running IDLE almost continuously, using it scores of times every day,
> 
> 
> Just to clarify: When you say "continuously", do you mean that you
> 
> keep it running for long periods of time? Because I've had various
> 
> issues on XP with leaving Idle running forever - it begins to take
> 
> arbitrarily long to switch back to it after leaving it, umm, idle for
> 
> a while. This is on a 32-bit system with 2GB of RAM. These days, I
> 
> tend to shut Idle down when I'm done with it.

I do really mean "continuously". I'm hopelessly addicted to listening to repeats of classic comedy programmes on Radio 4 Extra; I often listen at bedtime, and first thing in the morning; and I keep my computer running 24/7 (shutting it down only when I'm away from home overnight). Since I require Python in order to listen to my beloved radio programmes reliably (don't get me started on the subject of the thrice-accursed BBC website!), I therefore have IDLE running all the time, very probably sometimes for weeks on end.

There have been a few times when IDLE has become unresponsive, or awkward, in some way(s) - which I'm afraid I can't clearly remember, because it only happens every few days, and never bothers me that much - and then I do shut it down and restart it.

When I'm experimenting, or changing some BBC-related data, which my stupid code - now being fixed, I hope! - can't re-read without being re-imported, I often have to perform a Ctrl-F6 to restart the shell; but that's different, and is unrelated to performance problems, of which (until today, when it was my fault) there have been few.

My computer is also a 32-bit one, which I built in (believe it or not) 2003; it has only 768MB of RAM (and used to have even less).  Until this year I was also (believe it or not) using Windows 98SE. (No problems with IDLE on that, either, that I can remember.)

[By the way, I see that Google still haven't fixed the problem of posters' e-mail addresses becoming undisguised when they're quoted, which used to bother me years ago.  I do have Forte Agent installed on my netbook, but I only use it for e-mail, and I no longer have a Usenet account.  I'm starting to wish that I had one, because I really don't want my e-mail address being harvested by spammers (again)!  Spam, spam, spam, spam, ...]