IDLE Won't Start w/o Socket Error--Win XP

[W. Watson]

After simply trying to write a program with help(MakeQTE), a module, and
having it fail with socket errors, I decided to restart IDLE, thinking I
knew the cause. I'm now getting msgs like: "IDLE's subprocess didn't make
connection. ... firewall may be blocking the connection." I doubt the FW
connection. There's a small X warning dialog that says "Socket Error:
Connection refused." Is there a way to reset IDLE?

 

[Mike Driscoll]

After simply trying to write a program with help(MakeQTE), a module, and
having it fail with socket errors, I decided to restart IDLE, thinking I
knew the cause. I'm now getting msgs like: "IDLE's subprocess didn't make
connection. ... firewall may be blocking the connection." I doubt the FW
connection. There's a small X warning dialog that says "Socket Error:
Connection refused." Is there a way to reset IDLE?

I sometimes get this message when one of my programs fails to shutdown
properly. I program almost exclusively in Windows, so I open Task
Manager and kill all instance of Python.exe to fix this problem. I
have seen ZoneAlarm flag IDLE when I first installed Python, so if you
upgraded it recently, the firewall may be an issue.

Mike

 

[Gabriel Genellina]

After simply trying to write a program with help(MakeQTE), a module, and
having it fail with socket errors, I decided to restart IDLE, thinking I
knew the cause. I'm now getting msgs like: "IDLE's subprocess didn't make
connection. ... firewall may be blocking the connection." I doubt the FW
connection. There's a small X warning dialog that says "Socket Error:
Connection refused." Is there a way to reset IDLE?

From the IDLE About box:

IDLE executes Python code in a separate process, which is restarted for
each
Run (F5) initiated from an editor window. The environment can also be
restarted from the Shell window without restarting IDLE.

(Personal firewall software may warn about the connection IDLE makes to its
subprocess using this computer's internal loopback interface. This
connection
is not visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
from the Internet.)

From the help:

Running without a subprocess:

If IDLE is started with the -n command line switch it will run in a
single process and will not create the subprocess which runs the RPC
Python execution server. This can be useful if Python cannot create
the subprocess or the RPC socket interface on your platform. However,
in this mode user code is not isolated from IDLE itself. Also, the
environment is not restarted when Run/Run Module (F5) is selected. If
your code has been modified, you must reload() the affected modules and
re-import any specific items (e.g. from foo import baz) if the changes
are to take effect. For these reasons, it is preferable to run IDLE
with the default subprocess if at all possible.

 

[W. Watson]

Thanks. That did the trick.

....

I sometimes get this message when one of my programs fails to shutdown
properly. I program almost exclusively in Windows, so I open Task
Manager and kill all instance of Python.exe to fix this problem. I
have seen ZoneAlarm flag IDLE when I first installed Python, so if you
upgraded it recently, the firewall may be an issue.

Mike