@meltingSnowdrift, could you apply this small change to your Spyder installation and see if it fixes the problem you reported on issue #22551? Thanks!

I have just tried this and it works. Thank you, again, quite seriously.

I am slightly concerned, however, that this solution may incorrectly ignore many other unrelated error messages which happen to contain the same text but are much more serious in their causes. For example, some other user will quite likely make a genuinely misconfigured environment which really is broken for a reason related to a file not being found. Could it be desirable in the future to display such "harmless" error messages in some way which is not annoying but still readable to the user to help the user diagnose the potential real problems they may sometimes be associated with?

Alternately, could it be desirable to keep the previous behaviour (which made my environment unusable in Spyder) as default, but add an option in the environment selection screen of the settings window to try to open a console regardless of any error messages generated upon activating an environment? This way, people in my situation would be able to override the effects of error messages by manually turning on that option, but people with a genuinely broken environment would not be presented with a nonworking console without an explanation.

I hope this will not be the kind of fix that makes things work for me but causes future confusion for many other people. Thank you again for your patience and effort.