reinstall! Wow. I've gotten that message before, but rebooting is the most extreme solution to date for me.

It may be the case that your firewall is blocking connections to IP address 127.0.0.1, the internal loopback that Python uses.

If so, you can go into Symantec/Norton/McCaffee/whatever and enable Python on that address.

Hope that helps,
Jeff

Thanks Jeff I will try that!
Anjali.

Ive had that happen to me. What you can do is go to your task manager and under "processes" close all python software then re-open.

I had to reinstall twice before I figured that out.

I am not finding any place in symantec antivirus to put that ip address.
Although i disabled it all together, and it worked.
But still want to do that u said earlier.
waiting for answer, thanks!
Anjali.

This is lame! Is there a better free IDE? I'm sick of IDLE's issues.

If you are stuck on windows, check out Notepad++

Free IDE? Many
Wing IDE 101 - but reduced features
Drpython - No debugging
PyScripter
Netbeans with Nbpython
Eclipse with pydev plugin
Eric (Make sure you take care of Qt licence)............etc

I have had this problem with version 2.5, 2.6, and 3.0. I have uninstalled and reinstalled several times but IDLE is still not working. The error popup reads "Socket Error: A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network." IDLE does not work with the firewall turned off. Any suggestions?

Hey guys
I've had the same problem and by looking at lots of different ways to solve the problem i have found the solution. I'm not sure on the specific reasons and stuff but basically, the error only pops up if you had not ended the "while" command. So i think the code keeps repeating in that socket or something. Just remember before you close the python window when you go to test your code, write a code to end the "while" command.(it will tell you that the program is still running and if you want to kill it)