> Ah, you're using the full installer, which has the non-debug versions embedded and therefore does not ever need to download them.

Hm, makes sense now, however, isn't that a bug? I mean, even if it's embeded... I'm just curious ^^

> If you start from the web installer...

Aha, there's my problem! After using the web installer everything seems ok for me. Python now runs happily!

RE the unsupported: yeah, I kind of ignored that intentionally. Don't get me wrong, but the functionality you so badly want to push away is a wonderful thing. Ok, there's venv, I'm mostly satisfied with that or system-wide interpreter, but there are cases when you have to debug some annoying problems and you might broke the installation before thus a hypotetical issue arises. Maybe you deleted a file unintentionally, put a header for compilation here or there, renamed something...

What is the first thing someone asks you on for example IRC? "Have you tried a fresh Python installation?" Uhm, sure, because it's so easy if the installer throws things everywhere it can (registry, p&f, ...).

That's mostly not an issue, simple "Repair" is enough unless... you have a large build environment and reinstalling the environment from scratch could take a **long** while depending on the complexity of the environment. How do you test a fresh installation then? <-- Really, that's a serious question. I could come only with this before, though nuget coule be usable too ^^

Also, the network installer is almost the same thing as common MSI, but without elevation. It's like ~500kB or something and does basically this - adds keys to registry, to p&f, etc with a folder that you choose for installing via the network installer afaik. I just skip the part that makes Python unportable or burned into the system. What I do is basically what you do after compilation. Take binaries and put them somewhere, so that they run, nothing less, nothing more.

Thanks for your help, guys :)