David, Try disabling your firewall software momentarily to see if that makes a difference. IDLE uses a local port for inter-process communication - you may need to configure your firewall to allow IDLE's port usage.
To test whether Python itself has been properly installed, open up a cmd prompt, change your current directory to the folder where you installed Python, create the short, 1 line script that follows, and then run it. If this works, then Python has been successfully installed on your workstation and the problem you're having is specific to IDLE. 1 line script (place in hello.py) print "Hello world" Command line to run above script: python hello.py You might also try installing an alternate Python build, eg. if you installed from python.org, then try one of the setups from ActiveState. Or vice-versa. We're running Python 2.6.4 on Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista (32 and 64-bit), and Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit) without problem. Good luck! Malcolm
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