Alas, I spoke to soon. I saw the cursor returning to the shell, but the shell was dead at this point. IDLE just isn't a good environment for playing with Tk. So boot Python in a DOS box (blech) and run it from there, e.g. c:\python22\>python .\mystuff\testing.py Exit using the Tk icon, as mentioned. Sorry to give you (and me) false hope. Kirby