I do not have much to add, but second the idea of inquiring on python-list or the gmane mirror, especially about alternatives (other than Notepad, which is what I started with). Happily, IDLE has nearly always worked fine on my xp machine, so I have not tried anything else.

Macs have had more problems than Windows, but perhaps Vista is worse than XP. I will be moving to Windows 7 sometime. The intermittent behavior is, I think, unusual. Please try 3.1.3 or 3.2b1 or .2b2 (in a few days) to see if there is any difference.

It is possible that we could somehow improve the error message or docs.