"R6034 An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly" after pygtk being installed

Question

I'm using python 2.7.9 and encountered a problem when installing pygtk.

It displayed "Runtime error!...R6034 An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly" when installing numpy/scipy after pygtk being installed.

I tried to figure it out by searching it in stackoverflow and found two similar questions: Runtime error R6034 in embedded Python application and An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly.

So following the first one, I deleted the path corresponding to msvcr90.dll, however, it still cannot work. Then I chose to simply delete msvcr90.dll; at this time, this error wasn't presented when installing numpy/scipy, however, these two modules cannot work when simply typing "importing numpy/scipy".

I also renamed gtk-2.0 following the second one. Then numpy and scipy can be successfully installed. But it displayed "Error processing line 3 of C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pygtk.pth" when installing matplotlib using pip.

I'm really confused about it. Can anybody provide some methods to fix it?

Solution

I've installed Python and PyGTK on 5+ machines, at least two of them brand new, clean builds of Win 7.

I've got the An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly error whenever I install a Python package as a windows installer (rather than using pip) on all these machines. It's annoying, but has never made a jot of difference, both Python and Gtk function correctly.

You've deleted msvcr90.dll, and that is why you get your Error processing line 3... If you look at this file, you'll see that line 3 is import runtime, and if you look further into the 'runtime' package, you'll see that this then tries to find the missing dll.

I think your best bet is to try to restore the missing file. If it's still in your recycle bin - great!
If not, the best thing to do is reinstall the Visual C++ runtime library