In case anyone else runs into a similar problem, it turns out that I was handling DAL and Crud improperly in the modules I was trying to import. For db, I added this in db.py right after the initial definition of db:
current.db = db Then in my model, in any function that used db, I could just retrieve it like this: db = current.db With Crud, I could import Crud from gluon.tools at the top of each module file. Then in a function (after defining db) I could just define crud = Crud(db) With those two changes the imports worked fine. I'm sure all of this was in the web2py manual somewhere, but I didn't understand it there. It was looking through other questions and answers here on the google group that finally clued me in. Thanks to everyone in those discussions (I don't have the links, but you know who you are!).
