Ideally I wanted to set up an Emacs environment for Python development. I tried to install the plugins mentioned on this page:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PythonProgrammingInEmacs

Couln't get flymake and pyflakes to work. pymacs was a non-starter so I couln't use ropemacs.

I also tried CEDET, but that was an epic fail.