# Cannot open image files with VMTK 4.1 PypePad

**URL:** <https://discourse.slicer.org/t/cannot-open-image-files-with-vmtk-4-1-pypepad/31087>\
**Category:** Support\
**Tags:** vmtk\
**Created:** [August 10, 2023, 2:32pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/cannot-open-image-files-with-vmtk-4-1-pypepad/31087 "2023-08-10T14:32:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![am\_49](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.slicer.org/am_49/32/8346_2.png) [@am\_49](https://discourse.slicer.org/u/am_49)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2023, 2:32pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/cannot-open-image-files-with-vmtk-4-1-pypepad/31087/1 "2023-08-10T14:32:39Z")

</div>

Operating system: Windows 10  
Slicer version:  
Expected behavior: Reading image files with no errors.  
Actual behavior: I just installed VMTK 1.4 via Miniconda in a separate environment. Double clicking on a desktop shortcut opens PypePad. On an attempt to using its File|Open tabs to load .nii or .dcm files, error messages come up on the terminal window, like these ones:

Exception in Tkinter callback  
Traceback (most recent call last):  
File “C:\Users\Ja\miniconda3\envs\vm\lib\tkinter\__init_\_.py”, line 1558, in **call**  
return self.func(\*args)  
File “C:\Users\Ja\miniconda3\envs\vm\lib\site-packages\vmtk\pypepad.py”, line 114, in OpenCommand  
for line in openfile.readlines():  
File “C:\Users\Ja\miniconda3\envs\vm\lib\encodings\cp1250.py”, line 23, in decode  
return codecs.charmap\_decode(input,self.errors,decoding\_table)[0]  
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘charmap’ codec can’t decode byte 0x90 in position 381: character maps to

I reinstalled VMTK few times, using Python 5, Python 6, and a binary Windows installer to no avail. The sys.getdefaultencoding() run on Python returns ‘utf8’.

Please help.