This is a static archive of the Python wiki, which was retired in February 2026 due to lack of usage and the resources necessary to serve it — predominately to bots, crawlers, and LLM companies.
Pages are preserved as they were at the time of archival. For current information, please visit python.org.
If a change to this archive is absolutely needed, requests can be made via the infrastructure@python.org mailing list.

Asking for Help: IDLE doesn't clean up pythonw processes

...

I am trying to run Python on IDLE in Windows 7. Why doesn't IDLE close old pythonw processes on restarting the shell or even quitting IDLE? I'm having to manually close he processes in task manager. Is this normal or do I have to change some settings?

When answering questions, add the CategoryAskingForHelpAnswered category when saving the page. This will move the link to this page from the questions section to the answers section on the Asking for Help page.

CategoryAskingForHelp

2026-02-14 16:06