[python-win32] Damaged Pythonwin installation

[Greg Chapman]

I seem to have done something which has broken Pythonwin on one of my
machines.  It's using win32all build 163 and Python 2.3.2 (the OS is Windows
2000).  The most immediate symptom is that things seem very sluggish inside
Pythonwin.  However there are other more spectacular problems.

For example, I just started Pythonwin, created a new script document with
the line "print 'hello'", and saved it as temp.py.  I then pressed F11
twice.  This first loads the debugger (very slowly) and then results in
these error messages in the interactive window when the debugger attempts to
step into winout.py:


LoadBarState failed - LoadBarState failed (with win32 exception!)
< snip traceback >
win32ui: LoadFrame failed

win32ui: CreateNewFrame() virtual handler (<bound method
SyntEditTemplate.CreateNewFrame of
<pywin.framework.editor.coloreditor.SyntEditTemplate instance at
0x01616A30>>) raised an exception
TypeError: PyCTemplate::CreateNewFrame must return a PyCFrameWnd object.



Whatever the error was, it had some global effects.  After the error, my
Windows Start Menu was hosed (it only had the four items which are normally
above the top separator).  Also, notepad.exe started after the error comes
up without a menu bar.  Everything is back to normal after a reboot.

In case it's important, I had a newer version of scintilla.dll than the one
which comes with Pythonwin in a directory on the system PATH (but not in
python's sys.path).  Several reboots ago I renamed the dll in case Pythonwin
was somehow finding it instead of its own version, but that didn't seem to
make any difference.

I've already tried uninstalling and reinstalling win32all; unfortunately,
that did not fix the problem.  Anybody have any ideas on what's gone wrong
here?

Thanks.

---
Greg Chapman