Darn, I had that error before too, in Pygame, I wish I could recall what
caused that to happen! It was something totally unexpected.... I think
it was this: I had to wrap the environ variables up in an if statement,
because otherwise it would crash my Mac:
if sys.platform == 'win32':
os.environ['SDL_VIDEO_WINDOW_POS'] = '3,23'
os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER'] = 'windib'
Anyways, try commenting out your environ variable settings, see if that
helps... thought that might get you the 'DirectX' engine on older
versions of Pygame.
--Kamilche