Also, not sure if it's relevant but if I try to continue in
> IDLE I sometimes get "too many files open" errors as well
> as mostly non-working windows. Any suggestions?
I have seen problems on win32 with repeatedly loading the same
freetype2 font in backend agg. I've implemented several changes in
the next release to fix this. Hopefully they will solve your problem.
Stay tuned...
JDH