On Windows, installing tcl/tk separately without removing tcl/tk from python can cause tkinter to be very unstable. These bugs happen even if the versions differ by only a minor release number from the version shipped with python.

Selecting to not install tcl/tk with the installer also removes tkinter, and idle.  Which is what you don't want in this case.

To be able to use tkinter and idle and a full installation of tcl/tk you need to manually remove the following:

 - python/tcl directory
 - python/dlls/tcl84.dll
 - python/dlls/tk84.dll
 - python/dlls/tclpip84.dll

(or the corresponding versions)

And then make sure tcl's bin directory is in the path. 

This also avoids problems resulting from attempting to install tcl extensions into the python tcl directory (or tcl into pythons tcl directory) which tends to not work. 

Separating the tcl/tk and tkinter/idle in the installer along with adding advise on using a separate tcl installation with python would be helpful to some people.

I cannot understand why Python's Tkinter becomes unstable when Tcl is installed, or vice versa. Are you setting any environment variables (like TCL_HOME)? You should not do that.

I think part of my problem was because of having python/dlls directory in windows file path.  So that does explain some of it. Probably due to following instructions like this.

   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-win32/2002-September/000497.html

It still would be nice to have the option to not install tcl/tk (but keep tkinter) and use the newest update of tcl with python.

I use BLT to do graphs, and it installs fine if you remove tcl from python, install tcl and BLT together.  Keeping tcl in python results in the errors reported in th e above link. And following the advice and adding python/dlls to the path can result in conflicts.  

Is that clearer.  I know this isn't a common occurrence and not a problem with python directly.  That's why I listed it as a feature request and not as a bug.

Moving it to the feature-requests tracker.

Quoting from msg55008 "I know this isn't a common occurrence and not a problem with python directly" I believe this should be closed as "won't fix", what do the rest of you think?

I am not sure whether separately installing tcl/tk is generally feasible, without special care. tkinter depends on _tkinter, which is compiled against a particular tk version compiled with the same MS C compiler.

It was also not clear from the linked report why the BLT.dll would not work with the co-installed tcl/tk but would work with a separately installed tcl/tk.  Zack recently changed some of the tcl/tk compile options. Perhaps they make a difference.

I think being able to add tcl/tk extentions on Windows would be nice -- I can imagine wanting to do so myself. But I think the request should be 'compile and install tcl/tk so that user can add tcl/tk extensions' (without deleting and reinstalling).

@Steve what is your take on this?

tkinter and our tcl/tk builds are so closely linked there's no point separating them IMHO.

It sounds like this report was prompted by a misconfiguration, so there's nothing really to fix here.

Since installing tkinter without Tcl/Tk would leave tkinter unusable without a separately installed and configured Tcl/Tk (and thus probably generate copious reports about tkinter being broken), I don't think this is a good idea.  If someone *really* wants a different Tcl/Tk environment, they can always create their own.  Closing as rejected.

Terry's suggestion about being able to install Tcl/Tk extensions sounds reasonable, but I haven't played around with it and that should have its own issue if we're going to do anything with it.

In support of closing this, I note that we have gone the opposite direction on Mac, installing current tcl/tk together with _tkinter compiled against the tcl/tk being installed.