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Python on Windows and the PATH

Took me a few hours to track down a problem with importing win32com and getting "ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found" which wasn't very clear. I doesn't even say what DLL it can't find!

Long story short, it boils down to python not being able to find the pywintypes25.dll, which is located in C:\Python24, but which is not in the PATH. Seems like having C:\Python25 added to PATH or some other solution would be a good idea. The problem wasn't even with the pywin32 package, which is what I expected and where I kept looking, but in the configuration and runtime environment of the python interpreter.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
FileMonitor helps you
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/filemon.mspx
4:46 AM
Anonymous said…
+1, had a similar problem and this helped me find the missing dll that was being searched for.
Cheers!
9:48 AM
Ganesh Shamnur said…
It is not about the path alone:
If the current DLL being loaded refers to an additional DLL, the referred DLL needs to be present in the PYTHONPATH.
e.g:
a.dll is being loaded in python.
a.dll was created refering to b.dll.
So, make sure that both a.dll and b.dll are in the PYTHONPATH for proper loading.
2:11 AM
Anonymous said…
Thank you for all your comments!

Had a similar problem, a dll (in PYTHONPATH) was loading an additional dll - it did not show it's name. I used Process Monitor (the new FileMonitor) to find out what that missing file was.
10:06 AM
Ramprasad N said…
When I get the error "ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found." in python, how can I know which dll it is searching for?
I dont know whether the reply will automatically reach my mail inbox. so please also mail me the reply to ramprasad85 at gmail.com

Thanks you
4:42 PM
Anonymous said…
I'm not sure how old these comments are, but I'll add a comment since this is the first response in google for "python dll load failed."

I was able to fix this by importing pywintypes before win32api in the file that was producing the error. Give this a try, it fixed the problem for me...I guess we'll see if it causes a problem somewhere else...
10:25 AM
Christopher said…
the pywintypes worked for me as well. Python3.2 here.
7:23 PM
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