Py2exe - win32api.pyc ImportError DLL load failed

Question

I am trying to use py2exe to distribute a python application I have written. Everything seems to go OK, but when I run it on another machine it fails with the following err

Answer 1

Try adding win32api to your packages, in the options dictionary.

Here's an example:

excludes = ["pywin", "pywin.debugger"] # there will be more in real life...
options = dict(optimize=2,
           dist_dir="build",
           excludes=excludes,
           packages=["win32api"]) 
setup(
    name="MyCoolApp",
    options=dict(py2exe=options),
    # etc ...

Answer 2

@Wim, I found the bit about "adding this to the options dict in setup.py" a bit confusing. If like me you did not have an options arg in your existing call to setup this might make things clearer:

setup(name='myprog',     
      ...
      options={"py2exe":{"dll_excludes":[ "mswsock.dll", "powrprof.dll" ]}},
      ...
      )

Answer 3

I've seen this problem when the package was built on Vista but executed on XP. The problem turned out to be that py2exe mistakenly added powrprof.dll and mswsock.dll to the package. Windows XP contains its own copies of these files though, and can't load the Vista ones which got installed with your app.

Removing them from the package did the trick, you can do this easy by adding this to the options dict in setup.py

 'dll_excludes': [ "mswsock.dll", "powrprof.dll" ]

Answer 4

Just as an added comment. When rebuilding your program with Py2exe be sure to delete the old "dist" directory. I was sitting for over 3 hours not understanding why my app was working on my dev envirnoment and not in production. deleted dist and rebuild with py2exe and it worked.