anaconda navigator won't launch after a conda install tkinter

Question

I have been using conda and anaconda for a few weeks without any issue (with pythonv 3.6). However since I installed tkinter I cannot open the anaconda navigator nor spyder anymore. If i do it from the menu then nothing happend, if I try from the anaconda prompt, it does not work and windows says that python stopped working. The same thing happened yesterday so I unistalled everything and reinstalled anconda from scratch this morning. Everything worked perfectly and the navigator launched. So I then reinstalled tkinter, and the same bug as yesterday happened, I cannot open the anaconda navigator anymore. Installing tkinter also dowloads certifi, and this may be issue (based on what I read from other thread). Before installing tkinter I did update all, update conda and update anaconda navigator.

Here is the link to github issue I just opened, but I never posted there so I am not sure if I posted at the right place or in the tigh way. So I figured i would post here too.There is complete description of my conda environment there as well as the output from when I installed tkinter.

https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7209

Let me know if you need more information or if I should rewrite everything from github, but it will be a long post then...

Answer 1

As you can see from the output of your conda install command, when you try to install tkinter into your root conda environment a number of packages already installed there need to be downgraded in order to be compatible with tkinter. This is almost certainly what then causes problems with launching Anaconda Navigator.

Instead of installing new packages into the root conda env, you should create a new one and specify the packages you want to use there:

conda create -n myenv tk python

where myenv is the name you choose for your new environment and tk python is the list of packages you want to install - you can add any further ones to this list or install them later. (Usually you don't need to specify python itself as most packages are dependent on it, but it appears tk isn't one of them.)

To use the new environment, you then need to activate it, and/or make sure your IDE is configured to use the Python interpreter for that environment - see the conda docs for more help.