The problem I'm having is that I've written code that depends on features in python2.6 so I'm trying to build a check that will produce a useful error if someone tries to run it on a machine with python lower than 2.6. The code I put in to check for the specific version and match it should work fine but the problem I have is the interpreter on a 2.4 machine reads the file and sees a "finally" at the end of my try loop and errors out before it gets far enough into execution for my if statement to handle the version mismatch. Other than changing the magic line to specifically look for /usr/bin/python2.6 is there a way python can handle this sort of thing?