[issue12540] "Restart Shell" command leaves pythonw.exe processes running

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> added the comment:

I just 'upgraded' to 3.2.1 on my XP machine and I see the same with F5-run, which restarts before running the saved file. This appears to be a nasty regression from 3.2.0 that should have been a release blocker if caught earlier. I believe it merits a quick re-release, once fixed, of either the Windows binary or Python itself depending on whether this is windows specific or not.

The normal behavior when starting IDLE is 2 pythonw.exe processes -- one to run IDLE itself and the other for the attached process that runs user code. Restart/Run starts a third process with a fresh interpreter for user code and the old, orphaned user process should and usually does disappear in 2-3 seconds (on my old, slow machine). (There are tracker issues about this not always happening when a runaway process is stopped with ^C, but is has always worked otherwise.) Each process appears to take about 10+Mb, so anyone doing rapid code/test iterations, as I sometimes do, could easily overfill physical memory. 
Closing the IDLE windows does not stop the detached processes, so they have to be killed 1 at a time with 3 clicks each or by rebooting. Neither is pleasant.

Although I should have 3.2.1 loaded at least for reviewing issues, I plan to revert to 3.2.0.

Victor: do you know of any way to test for process extinction on Windows?

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nosy: +georg.brandl, haypo, kbk, loewis, terry.reedy
priority: normal -> critical
stage:  -> needs patch

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue12540>
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