What could cause an open file dialog window in Tkinter/Python to be really slow to close after the user selects a file?

Question

I can do the following in my program to get a simple open file dialog and print the selected file path. Unfortunately it doesn't go away right away when the user selects the file, and stays around for over 5 minutes. How do I make the window disappear immediately once a selection has been made before executing more python code? After the Tkinter code I do try to import some video using OpenCV which I think may be causing the slowing. My OpenCV code does execute properly and I don't think there is a problem with that alone (i.e. some interaction is causing the error & maybe some intensive process is started before Tkinter wraps up its GUI dialog). ``` import Tkinter as Tk import cv2 from tkFileDialog import askopenfilename root = Tk.Tk() root.withdraw() # we don't want a full GUI, so keep the root window from appearing filename = askopenfilename() # show an "Open" dialog box and return the path to the selected file print(filename) cap = cv2.VideoCapture('video.mp4') # this works just f…

Accepted Answer

I was having some trouble with Tkinter dialog boxes. Like you, the dialog just sat there after I had selected a file. I didn't try leaving it for very long, it may have disappeared after 5 minutes as you said your's did. After lots of random experimentation I found that calling `root.update()` before the `askopenfilename()` line seemed to fix it.

For reference, this is the code I was testing with:

```
import sys
from tkinter import *
from tkinter import filedialog

#instantiate a Tk window
root = Tk()

#set the title of the window
root.title('Tk test')

# I don't know, what this does, but it fixes askopenfilename if I use it.
root.update()

print(filedialog.askopenfilename(title='dialogue? surely.'))
```

What could cause an open file dialog window in Tkinter/Python to be really slow to close after the user selects a file?

Solution

Problem