The following modules appear to be missing ['_sysconfigdata']

[dude.jimbo at gmail.com]

OK, stop the presses. Or, rather, refresh your browser, I guess.

In a 'what the !@$$ am I doing'-moment (I don't get those often) I uninstalled everything and went gardening. But it was raining so I installed everything again, this time using pip for wxpython. Lo and behond, this time it did not crash the cmd-window, but in stead it successfully installed it.

Woot.

Then I compiled again with same command and same setup.py and - stubbornly - with py2exe, and got… different errors! That's actually a good sign. No, really.

Because this time, the error was about missing Windows DLLs and here I got plenty of help from my best friend Google (don't tell JackD he's actually second best friend). So, after x iterations I ended up with the following cute setup.py:
<-
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

setup(console=['AutoArchive.py'],

      options={
                'py2exe': { 
                'dll_excludes': ['api-ms-win-core-string-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-psapi-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-localization-l1-2-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-security-base-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-string-obsolete-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-delayload-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-handle-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-crt-private-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-libraryloader-l1-2-1.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-memory-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-heap-obsolete-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-atoms-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-processthreads-l1-1-1.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-delayload-l1-1-1.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-processthreads-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-com-midlproxystub-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-crt-string-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-libraryloader-l1-2-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-errorhandling-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-string-l2-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-synch-l1-2-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-profile-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-synch-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-threadpool-legacy-l1-1-0.dll',
                                 'api-ms-win-core-interlocked-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-debug-l1-1-0.dll', 'api-ms-win-core-sysinfo-l1-1-0.dll']
              }
         },
      )
->

After which all the missing DLL errors were finally gone (and no, I don’t wanna know why all of the above is even necessary). Success!! Or not? Because I was now right back at:

<-
The following modules appear to be missing
['Carbon.Appearance', '_sysconfigdata']
->

You cannot possibly be serious!? _sysconfigdata is back… with a friend!

Luckily it was still raining so my plan to blow up the PC in my garden fire pit (and dancing hysterically around the glorious resulting bonfire, while in the nude) got scrapped, which allowed me to notice that an actual dist folder had in fact been created, and not just that, there was an EXE inside!

So I ran it.

and it worked.

It worked!

It did exactly what it needed to do. Just like on my old machine. I even got the fancy progress popup and the date string in my file names.

(At this point I ~did~ dance in the nude, albeit in front of the PC)

So what lessons did I learn:
1) compile errors apparently mean Sweet-BLEEP-All;
2) close the curtains when dancing naked around the PC;
3) the back of modern day PCs, which typically sit at groin height on your desk, get really hot at the back. Avoid contact with exposed body parts;
4) there's clearly a reason why I 'gave up on Python' those 10 years ago, and perhaps I'm slowly starting to remember why… :|

Jimbo.