This is not a fresh install of windows 10 so I've probably done something at some point that has essentially bricked my computer's ability to run basic Python stuff so I'm hoping somebody might look at this and understand what's going on. I'm going to document exactly what I tried and where it went wrong and hopefully someone who's more experienced knows what these errors mean.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled python many times trying to get this to work. I did the normal uninstall but I also used a program called everything to search my entire drive for anything related to Python. I went to all my Python 312 folders in programfiles and appdata/roaming and appdata/local/programs and deleted them manually as well. I have also deleted all virtual environments off my computer as well. I also uninstalled all Python extensions for VS code.
I went and installed Python fresh from the website
here are the settings I used when installing Python
I don't know if this is bad but The thing is red
now let's go to command prompt and test it out
kind of strange how I just installed the most recent version of pip and it's still telling me to get the most recent version of pip but we can ignore this for now
I installed the virtualenv library with success
brilliant it looked like it actually worked!!, now let's try making the actual virtual environment I want with the required library versions
I've seen a lot of errors similar to this before and the suggestions on forums have not become any less esoteric than they were in the past. At this point I think I will download a Linux virtual machine and simply use that to run all my virtual environment Python code from now on. If anybody has any suggestions I would appreciate it but I find it ridiculous how deep one has to dive to simply get Python working on so many computers and it seems like my computer is bricked for no good reason.
I managed to get it working by using an Ubuntu virtual machine, not a single hang up.