Jurgen, thank you very much for explanations and instructions! Adding ssleay32.dll and updating and libeay32.dll in %WINDIR%\system32 helped: >>> import qgis.core >>> For those who may be interested, I added %OSGEO4W_ROOT%\bin to PATH variable and set PYTHONPATH to %OSGEO4W_ROOT%\apps\Python25\lib\site-packages\ Radek