pip/easy_install failure: failed to create process

After following this article: How do I install pip on Windows? on my Windows system using Enthought Canopy 64 Bit system, I cannot get pip or easy_install to work due to error:

pip install requests
failed to create process

I tried re-installing setuptools, running cmd prompt as admin without any effect.

When I encountered this, it was because I'd manually renamed the directory python was in. This meant that both setuptools and pip had to be reinstalled. Or, I had to manually rename the python directory to what it had been previously.

It will help after changing the PATH to python in environment variables:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip --force-reinstall

Just ran into this. Sort of. Pip worked for me, but after installing pytest-watch, running the ptw script was giving this error.

For some reason, pip stopped quoting the #! in ptw-script.py:

#!C:\Program Files (x86)\Python\python.exe

It worked after I added quotes manually:

#!"C:\Program Files (x86)\Python\python.exe"

I don't really know why this suddenly started happening. Adding this here in case anyone else coming here from Google runs into the same thing.

Here's a related pip issue (I think).

If you intentionally want to rename the folder where python.exe resides, you should also modify all python files in the Scripts folder. So a third solution would be to modify the python files as well: the first line in pip-2.7-script.py originally contain:

#!C:\OriginalPythonDir\python.exe

Modifying this path to the new Python folder fixes the problem.

(P.S. Unfortunately I cannot yet reply to answers, so I'll reply as a new answer because I thought it could be useful for other people as well).

To fix this error (after you change the folder where python is installed) run force-reinstall for pip and pyinstaller, like this:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip --force-reinstall

python -m pip install --upgrade pyinstaller --force-reinstall