I’ve got Kiln, Mercurial, TortoiseSVN, SlikSVN, Git and TortoiseHg all installed on my Windows 7 workstation and they all hate each other and won’t play nice at times. A couple of weeks ago I updated Mercurial, didn’t give it much thought but started noticing two glaring error messages in my console window:

*** failed to import extension kiln from C:\…\kiln.py: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

*** failed to import extension kbfiles from C:\…\kbfiles: 'module' object has no attribute 'basestore'

It appears that KilnHg is throwing errors and even worse, unfriendly error messages, which is a bit odd for a Fog Creek product to say the least.

There is actually a very simple fix to this, and it’s to do with the PATH environment variable. When I updated Mercurial it tweaked my path, inserting C:\Program Files\Mercurial ahead of C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg in the search order. Editing the PATH to put C:\Program Files\Mercurial after C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg fixes the issue.

This is what my path looked like after updating Mercurial:

PATH=
C:\Program Files\ConEmu\ConEmu;
C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;
C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;
c:\utils;
C:\utils\GnuWin32\bin;
C:\Program Files (x86)\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraEdit\;
C:\Program Files (x86)\ImageMagick-6.7.3-Q16;
C:\Program Files\Mercurial\;
C:\Program Files\SlikSvn\bin;
C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin;
C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\cmd

And this is what my path looks like now:

PATH=
C:\Windows\system32;
C:\Windows;
C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;
c:\utils;C:\utils\GnuWin32\bin;
C:\Program Files (x86)\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraEdit\;
C:\Program Files (x86)\ImageMagick-6.7.3-Q16;
C:\Program Files\SlikSvn\bin;
C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin;
C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\cmd;
C:\Program Files\Mercurial\

Which makes those annoying error messages go away. The fastest and easiest way to edit your PATH is using RapidEE

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