Python's subprocess doesn't like SmartFTP

Well, that was a frustrating afternoon. I was trying to automate the update process described in my previous post - an executable that uses SmartFTP's COM library to connect to an FTP server and download new files - by calling it from a Python script that would check the output and re-run the updater as necessary. I wanted to use the subprocess module, as I was advised by the Python docs that this was the New Cool Thing, and I wanted to use the environment variable functionality that it provided.

However, I consistently received the following error:

[20080506 19:05:00] SmartFTP FTP Library v1.5.8.21
[20080506 19:05:00] Resolving host name "ftp.******.com"
[20080506 19:05:00] Unable to resolve host name.
[20080506 19:05:00] 1

So I replaced the hostname with the IP address and got this error instead:

The requested service provider could not be loaded or initialized.

I found this phrase in the Microsoft Winsock documentation, at which point I had a mild aneurysm and went to work on something else for a while. I came back a little later to read that documentation, but it was unhelpful.

Finally I switched over to declaring the environment variables and calling the executable in a batch file and called that using os.system instead of subprocess... and it worked fine. So it appears that there's some incompatibility between this vendor app and/or SmartFTP's FTP library and Python's subprocess module. Guess I'll be using the tried and true os.system for now, because it's definitely not worth any more debugging time.