[Ikopar]

You prefer the DOS-box over IDLE? Why?

[Koplaf]

{ and [ are obvious sending control signals/characters to the prompt. I have no idea why, but googling "square bracket dos control signal" or similar might tell you.

[Ikopar]

Kopilman, http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx ?

[Kopilman]

My keyboard / regular "cmd" prompts / cygwin work just fine... it's *only* when I run interactive python...

[Ikopar]

Kopilman, Also, what do you get by running this:
Python -Ec "import sys; print sys.stdin.encoding" & mode con cp

[Kopilman]

Ikopar, this works, output in pastebin => python -Ec "import sys; print sys.stdin.encoding" & mode con cp
this "works" but doesn't display anything, si... => import msvcrt; print msvcrt.getch()

[Ikopar]

At the prompt, type ‘command’; at the new prompt, type ‘python -’
But getch() works for the other keys, yes?

[Kopilman]

look at this:
>>> msvcrt.getch()
'['
>>>
Hadn't understood what you were telling me, sorry
So, getch() works just fine for the characters that give me trouble otherwise

[Ikopar]

Try: ‘python con’

[Kopilman]

That works
I.e. [ works
This kinda helps me, but I'd love to know wtf is going wrong :-)