Import Error: DLL load failed

When trying to import seaborn on windows (x64) the following error is raised:

ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-1-ed9806ce3570> in <module>()
----> 1 import seaborn as sns

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\seaborn\__init__.py in <module>()
----> 1 from .rcmod import *
      2 from .utils import *
      3 from .palettes import *
      4 from .linearmodels import *
      5 from .categorical import *

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\seaborn\rcmod.py in <module>()
      6 import matplotlib as mpl
      7 
----> 8 from . import palettes
      9 
     10 mpl_ge_150 = LooseVersion(mpl.__version__) >= '1.5.0'

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\seaborn\palettes.py in <module>()
     10 from .external.six.moves import range
     11 
---> 12 from .utils import desaturate, set_hls_values, get_color_cycle
     13 from .xkcd_rgb import xkcd_rgb
     14 from .crayons import crayons

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\seaborn\utils.py in <module>()
      6 
      7 import numpy as np
----> 8 from scipy import stats
      9 import pandas as pd
     10 import matplotlib as mpl

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\scipy\stats\__init__.py in <module>()
    336 from __future__ import division, print_function, absolute_import
    337 
--> 338 from .stats import *
    339 from .distributions import *
    340 from .morestats import *

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\scipy\stats\stats.py in <module>()
    178 from scipy._lib.six import callable, string_types
    179 from numpy import array, asarray, ma, zeros
--> 180 import scipy.special as special
    181 import scipy.linalg as linalg
    182 import numpy as np

C:\Users\kasus\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\scipy\special\__init__.py in <module>()
    625 from __future__ import division, print_function, absolute_import
    626 
--> 627 from ._ufuncs import *
    628 
    629 from .basic import *

ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

These are the current verions of my conda environment:

conda: 4.0.6.
numpy: 1.10.4
pandas: 0.18.1
scipy: 0.17.1
seaborn: 0.7.0

Do you know how to fix this?

[Irene-GM]

I had the same problem trying to run seaborn within a conda environment running with Python 3.4.5. In my case the solution was downgrading scipy (and dependencies sklearn, mkl, and numpy) from 0.19.1 to 0.17.1. I also tried first downgrading it to 0.18.1, but apparently the bad interaction with seaborn appears in version 0.18.1 already. So by doing this, i can import seaborn without that error message. I hope someone has some time to take a look to this and provide some more info 😃

[mwaskom]

Yep, looks like a bad scipy installation. I’d ask over there.