pykem@...1034... wrote ..
When I try to import pylab, I get the error
message shown below. I also tried the earlier version of matplotlib (matplotlib-0.87.win32-py2.3)
with the same result.
File "C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\font_manager.py", line
456, in createFontDict
warnings.warn("Cannot handle unicode filenames %s"%fpath)
So, it looks like what's happening is that Matplotlib is trying to cache your font files, and as it does so, it's encountered a font whose filename has unicode characters in it. This is not a problem in and of itself, and it just tries to warn you; however, the warning module is choking on the warning string that's being passed into it. So, until this gets fixed for real, a quick hack would be to edit your font_manager.py and remove the reference to the file name:
warnings.warn("Cannot handle unicode filenames")
Not as useful an error message as before, but it'll get you up and running. 
-Peter