ImportError after some updates

[Marta J.]

Hi, I am following tutorial (for Django 1.8), I am using Windows 8, Pycharm, Python 2.7.9 and Django 1.8.3.

I have reached the third chapter (on views) and somewhere on the way I restarted my laptop and probably installed some updates. Out of sudden the commands "python manage.py ..." stopped working (to be precise I was trying to use python manage.py runserver command), and I was getting ImportError (a long stack trace with info Import by filename is not supported). 

So I moved my project to trash and tried to start a new project but was not able to run django-admin startproject :(

The present stacktrace (still with ImportError) refers to __init__.py in importlib directory (C:/Python27/Lib/importlib/__init__.py) and it seems to hate  __import__(name) part of import_module function. 

Could anyone help me on that as I cannot see what has changed since when everything worked smoothly :(

Here's the __init__.py code:

"""Backport of importlib.import_module from 3.x."""

# While not critical (and in no way guaranteed!), it would be nice to keep this

# code compatible with Python 2.3.

import sys

def _resolve_name(name, package, level):

    """Return the absolute name of the module to be imported."""

    if not hasattr(package, 'rindex'):

        raise ValueError("'package' not set to a string")

    dot = len(package)

    for x in xrange(level, 1, -1):

        try:

            dot = package.rindex('.', 0, dot)

        except ValueError:

            raise ValueError("attempted relative import beyond top-level "

                              "package")

    return "%s.%s" % (package[:dot], name)

def import_module(name, package=None):

    """Import a module.

    The 'package' argument is required when performing a relative import. It

    specifies the package to use as the anchor point from which to resolve the

    relative import to an absolute import.

    """

    if name.startswith('.'):

        if not package:

            raise TypeError("relative imports require the 'package' argument")

        level = 0

        for character in name:

            if character != '.':

                break

            level += 1

        name = _resolve_name(name[level:], package, level)

    __import__(name)

    return sys.modules[name]