$ setup.py sdist bdist_wininst upload
   ...
   running upload
   Submitting dist\argparse-0.8.0.zip to http://www.python.org/pypi
   Server response (200): OK
   Submitting dist\argparse-0.8.0.win32.exe to http://www.python.org/pypi
   Upload failed (400): Bad Request

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? (I've always been able to upload
bdist_wininst packages to PyPI in the past.)

     Error processing form

     invalid distribution file

Looks like this originates from:

     https://svn.python.org/packages/trunk/pypi/webui.py

down near the bottom in the file_upload() method. I can't figure out
which "invalid distribution file" error is being triggered, but in
looking around, I saw that is_distutils_file() in:

     https://svn.python.org/packages/trunk/pypi/verify_filetype.py

says:

     if filename.endswith('.exe'):
         # check for valid exe
         if filetype != 'bdist_wininst':
             return False

         try:
             t = StringIO.StringIO(content)
             t.filename = filename
             z = zipfile.ZipFile(t)
             l = z.namelist()
         except zipfile.error:
             return False

         for zipname in l:
             if not safe_zipnames.match(zipname):
                 return False

That seems a little weird to me. Are the bdist_wininst exe files really
zip files? Or did I just misunderstand what "content" is?

 >>> zipfile.ZipFile('argparse-0.8.0.win32.exe').namelist()
['.../lib/argparse-0.8.0-py2.5.egg-info', '.../lib/argparse.py']

Interestingly, it looks like none of these are "safe_zipnames" according to:

     https://svn.python.org/packages/trunk/pypi/verify_filetype.py

I wonder why that is...

Also, I couldn't get the StringIO code from there to work:

 >>> import StringIO
 >>> content = open('argparse-0.8.0.win32.exe').read()
 >>> t = StringIO.StringIO(content)
 >>> t.filename = 'argparse-0.8.0.win32.exe'
 >>> z = zipfile.ZipFile(t)
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in <module>
   File "C:\Python25\lib\zipfile.py", line 346, in __init__
     self._GetContents()
   File "C:\Python25\lib\zipfile.py", line 366, in _GetContents
     self._RealGetContents()
   File "C:\Python25\lib\zipfile.py", line 378, in _RealGetContents
     raise BadZipfile, "File is not a zip file"
BadZipfile: File is not a zip file

So any ideas why distutils is generating a bdist_wininst installer with
file names like:

     lib/argparse-0.8.0-py2.5.egg-info
     lib/argparse.py

instead of what John Machin had:

     PURELIB/xlrd-0.6.1a4-py2.5.egg-info
     PURELIB/xlrd/biffh.py

The ones with 'lib' instead of 'PURELIB' will get rejected by the
safe_zipnames regular expression in verify_filetype.py:

     re.compile(r'(purelib|platlib|headers|scripts|data).+', re.I)

Is there something I need to do when running 'setup.py bdist_wininst' to
get 'PURELIB' instead of 'lib'?

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#administrator-ins...

I had created a distutils.cfg to redirect my installs from the regular
site-packages directory.

Since the distutils.cfg settings are read in for all distutils uses at
the command line, they were also being read in when I tried to run
"setup.py bdist_wininst", and so all my filenames were getting the
altered paths instead of the regular PURELIB ones.

Thanks everyone for the help!