[Zope] Accessing Basic Zope Objects

Hi All, I am having trouble accessing Zope Objects (importing them into my Python scripts). I am setting the PYTHONPATH INSTANCE_HOME environment variables in my startup scripts. While I can load these modules into Python at the command line I can't import them through Zope. Questions: How and where do you set Zope/Python environment variables so they can be able to find the Zope APIs? If I have other versions of Python (not included with Zope) running on the system can this cause the interpreter to become confused? Thanks in advance.