[Dan Shafer]
i'm going to test with a small, known-working external script later today and see if this is a config problem of some sort. But I've already concluded one thing: external scripts are too hard to use because there's no way to debug them.
I don't find that to be the case, if you use Python External Methods. You do have to capture sample data. Then you can get the script to do some self-tests, or log strategic information, and it's often possible to do very well with that information. If the script does not call any Zope objects, then you can make it work independently of Zope, debugging it like any other program. If you make heavy use of Zope objects in your script, though, it's true that it's harder, so I try to avoid that. Use them in Zope and pass the results to the external method whenever you can. Cheers, Tom P