I am a retired programmer. I still like to write small programs for my own interest. Python is ideal for this. I prefer to use Idle rather than the command line. For some time now when I click on the Idle shortcut on the home screen, the command line screen flashes and then nothing. I am not able to do anything on Idle. I had been using Python33. So I upgraded to Python34. It was the same thing. I looked at the batch file, idle.bat. This is what it contains.

@echo off
rem Start IDLE using the appropriate Python interpreter
set CURRDIR=%~dp0
start "IDLE" "%CURRDIR%..\..\pythonw.exe" "%CURRDIR%idle.pyw" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

I don't understand what %~dp0 means. I can't think what changes I have made to the operating system, it is Windows 7, that could cause this problem.

As I say Python is great for what I do. But I am stuck with the command line if I cannot fix this.

Tomk