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I verified problem in 3.3 and when opening dialog from shell.
Patch fixes problem, including open idle, open dialog, close shell, select file, and now file is opened. Thanks Roger. I went ahead and applied fix. (But note: your patch had a 'blank' line with several spaces. Not allowed. We both should remember to run whitespace-at-end-of-line stripper.)
I did not close yet because I think the comments need improvement (and perhaps made into doc string). Hence 'needs (second) patch'.
 # If the current window has no filename and hasn't been
 # modified, we replace its contents (no loss). Otherwise
 # we open a new window. But we won't replace the
 # shell window (which has an interp(reter) attribute), which
 # gets set to "not modified" at every new prompt.
I think that means to say "If the current window is a never-modified new, empty, untitled edit window, load the file there." If it had any contents to replace, I believe it would be either titled or modified. So that seem misleading.
The 'otherwise..open a new window' is not true since a file can be opened (for writing) only once, and if it is already open, focus is simply shifted to its current window.
So I think the behavior can be summarized as "If the file is already open in an edit window, shift focus to that window. Otherwise open a new window (or use the current window if it is new, unmodified, and untitled) and load the file."
 # Also, make sure the current window has not been closed,
 # since it can be closed during the Open File dialog.
This seems misplaced where it is since overall we are *not* making sure that the current window is still open, but are taking measures to make sure open works even if it has been closed. I think that the comment that might be added before this block is that flist is being saved in case the parent window gets closed while the dialog is open.
I am also curious if you understand
 # Code for use outside IDLE:
or might this be obsolete?