I have a Windows  laptop. 

Normally it resides in a docking station, meaing my Home 
directory is referenced from a network drive labelled 'H:' 

When I Eject the labtop my home directory by scripted 
magick becomes referenced off 'C:'

If I have Idle running already and start a new Idle 
window, the new window will fail, raising a FileError 
exception over not finding the '.idlerc' at 'H:' - which it 
cannot because it disapeared.

If I do not have Idle running and start it after undocking, 
it will fail silently never bringing up a window. 

I suspect for the same reason: The home drive changes 
but the change is not reflected  in the information 
available to Python/Idle.


Maybe it is possible to search for a valid path when the 
first (cached?) attempt fails - or maybe a workaround 
could be to raise a Warning instead of an Exception, 
letting the user decide?
 

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Hm, changing the system config underneath IDLE?
I'm not surprised it gets confused :-)

Although this is a rather special case, I think that you 
should be able to make IDLE do what you want by
modifying configHandler.py:IdleConf.GetUserCfgDir()
to "do the right thing."

I'm a little more mystified by the second case where
IDLE isn't running when you undock.  If it can't find
.idlerc it should create it.  You say IDLE never starts
at all?  Please start IDLE from a command window and
see what error messages are printed.

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No response from OP, closing as 'will not fix"