Cannot import distutils from within a py2exe-compiled script

I am on Windows Server 2012R2, trying to compile a script with py2exe, within a virtualenv, and I'm getting issues whenever one of the application scripts tries to "import distutils" (in my case, it's somewhere inside a 3rd-party library, but I reduced the problem here).

Steps to reproduce:

Create a virtualenv

virtualenv venv
call venv\Scripts\activate

Install py2exe inside the virtualenv

easy_install --always-unzip py2exe-0.6.9.win64-py2.7.amd64.exe

Create setup.py

from distutils.core import setup
    try:
        import py2exe
    except:
        pass

setup(
    console=[
        'py2exe_distutils.py'
    ]
)

Create py2exe_distutils.py
```
import distutils
```
Run py2exe
```
python setup.py py2exe
```
Try to run the generated executable
```
dist\py2exe_distutils.exe
```

It returns:

    C:\Users\root\p\dist\library.zip\distutils\__init__.py:14: UserWarning: The virtualenv distutils package at %s appears to be in the same location as the system distutils?
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "py2exe_distutils.py", line 6, in <module>
        import distutils
      File "distutils\__init__.pyc", line 25, in <module>
    ImportError: cannot import name dist

The script runs fine when I run it directly (python py2exe_distutils.py), even from within the virtualenv.

Am I trying to do something unsupported by py2exe, or is something wrong with my setup?

Solution

I had the same problem while creating an executable that used pandas 0.12.0. This worked for me: before you create the executable, copy the distutils folder from the base python installation

robocopy C:\Python27\Lib\distutils venv\Lib\distutils /E /COPY:DAT

I am using virtualenv 12.0.4 and py2exe 0.6.6 on Windows 7 Professional. Some extra insight can be found here. This answer pointed me in the direction of just copying the files.