I will answer my own question in case anyone else ever has this problem. I knew the problem (although some say it's not) existed with the namespace of pictures, that if you didn't save the pictures in persistent memory they would disappear as soon as the function that called them was exited. So a while ago I went through this and fixed it by saving all my pictures and widgets that held them as class objects.
However, apparently I was causing the same thing to happen by not saving the class instance as an object of the class that called it. So this fixed it: def uts5100(self): self.sys5100 = UTS5100( self.master ) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list