Thanks, Terry, you pointed me in the right direction with the reference to the "DEBUG".
I dug out my "Learning Python" book, to read up on the debugger, and one of the things I came across was a section on IDLE's debugger. It said essentially that if you get an error that doesn't make sense when you're trying to run another program (in this case, py2exe) with IDLE, then run the program from the command line instead. I did that, and much to my surprise, I was able to generate the 'exe' that I needed. I guess the incompatibility isn't necessarily between 'py2exe' and 'smtplib' after all, but between 'py2exe' and 'IDLE'. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
