Can't import WinPty in Mamba/Conda Environment

Question

I'll try to outline what the issue I'm facing in this post:

Issue

For some reason, the winpty module cannot be imported in the base mamba/conda environment on an AWS virtual machine I have running Windows Server 2016 running on an EC2 instance on AWS. Whenever I tried to import winpty, I got this ImportError:

ImportError: DLL load failed while importing winpty: The specified procedure could not be found.

However, when I installed mamba on my own local Windows machine (my Windows 10 laptop), winpty which was installed to the base mamba environment in my local machine can be imported with no issue.

I noticed this with other applications as well like Spyder. For some reason, on the Windows Server 2016 virtual machine Spyder crashed when it's loaded but on my local machine Spyder IDE 5.1.5 can be loaded in base mamba/conda environment with no issue whatsoever.

Below is the output of conda info which will tell you all the details about the conda/mamba base environment in my virtual machine:

  active environment : base
    active env location : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge
            shell level : 1
       user config file : C:\Users\<user_name>\.condarc
 populated config files : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge\.condarc
                          C:\Users\<user_name>\.condarc
          conda version : 4.10.3
    conda-build version : not installed
         python version : 3.9.7.final.0
       virtual packages : __win=0=0
                          __archspec=1=x86_64
       base environment : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge  (writable)
      conda av data dir : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge\etc\conda
  conda av metadata url : None
           channel URLs : https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/win-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/win-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/msys2/win-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/msys2/noarch
                          https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/win-64
                          https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/noarch
          package cache : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge\pkgs
                          C:\Users\<user_name>\.conda\pkgs
                          C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Local\conda\conda\pkgs
       envs directories : C:\ProgramData\mambaforge\envs
                          C:\Users\<user_name>\.conda\envs
                          C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Local\conda\conda\envs
               platform : win-64
             user-agent : conda/4.10.3 requests/2.26.0 CPython/3.9.7 Windows/10 Windows/10.0.19043
          administrator : True
             netrc file : None
           offline mode : False

What have I Tried

I have tried:

• uninstalled mamba/reinstalled it
• create a new virtual environment called test_mamba_env and then in this new environment I:
  • ran mamba install jupyterlab -c conda-forge which will install jupyter lab along with winpty
  • tried to run python and then do import winpty and I got the same ImportErro like the one below:

  ImportError: DLL load failed while importing winpty: The specified procedure could not be found.
  

At this point I have no idea what caused the error in my virtual Windows Server 2016 machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!