This issue is essentially a duplicate of #12092. For the OP there, the stall happens because something on Gnome pops up a configuration GUI and, I presume, waits for response. I am thinking now that 'modules' is simply a bad idea and should be removed or severely changed to only list and not execute. There is no telling *what* might be on the search path.

I noted there that there are two issues: documenting help() better, and changing the behavior of help('modules') and that there is least a behavior bug. I am only leaving this issue open because of the report of IDLE crashing - which does not happen on Win7, 3.2. I know nothing of how IDLE executes on *nix and whether there is anything that might be done to at least exit more gracefully.

We might make this the 'change code' issue, though if code is change, some of the proposed doc change will become obsolete.