[Idle-dev] problem starting idle

[Bruce Sherwood]

For what it's worth, I have seen this happen on a Windows laptop with no 
communications card plugged in. The problem goes away after plugging in the 
card, even if the card is not connected to a network! Evidently this has 
something to do with software sockets being confused with hardware sockets.

You might get slightly more information by using a somewhat modified 
version of Idle that you can download from http://vpython.org. It tries to 
provide a bit more information when this happens.

Bruce Sherwood