running selenium with pythonw.exe fails with invalid handle

[ruidc]

running the following in a script via pythonw.exe:

from selenium import webdriver
profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

results in something like:

  File "zzz\selenium\webdriver\firefox\webdriver.py", line 59, in __init__
  File "zzz\selenium\webdriver\firefox\extension_connection.py", line 47, in __init__
  File "zzz\selenium\webdriver\firefox\firefox_binary.py", line 65, in launch_browser
  File "zzz\selenium\webdriver\firefox\firefox_binary.py", line 88, in _start_from_profile_path
  File "subprocess.pyc", line 702, in __init__
  File "subprocess.pyc", line 833, in _get_handles
  File "subprocess.pyc", line 884, in _make_inheritable
WindowsError: [Error 6] The handle is invalid

see also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25203955/how-to-run-selenium-webdriver-with-pythonw

[barancev]

Selenium 2.40 is out of date

[ruidc]

This is in 2.45.0
Note that the SO question is from someone else.

[barancev]

So don't include links to discussion threads related to outdated versions without ever mentioning your own version :)

What is Firefox version? What is python version?
Can you reproduce the issue with python instead of pythonw?

[ruidc]

Sorry, I thought you might have tried it first :)
Python 2.7.9 (default, Dec 10 2014, 12:28:03) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Firefox is 38.0.1
no this problem is specific to pythonw.exe because of how it differs in handles for stdin/stdout/stderr

[barancev]

@lukeis @AutomatedTester

[barancev]

Selenium is not a GUI application, there is no reason to run it with pythonw instead of python. If one prefers to use pythonw one can redirect output streams.