Thank you for replying so quickly;  the issue stems from a bug created here
which explains it a bit better:
https://github.com/caronc/nzb-notify/issues/27 (scroll to the bottom).

In my case, I had a lib\site-packages\backports in C:\Python27 that keeps
over-riding the one defined in the \MyLibraries path. But even when the
'sys.path' has been successfully overridden, the backports module (one i
provide for the package of interest) keeps reverting to the
C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\ path.  It actually just throws an exception
that the module doesn't exist (when ordering of paths would say it does).

To answer your other question: I got the installer from here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2713/ (the MSI 64 bit
installer - second from the bottom)