RemoveError: 'pyopenssl' is a dependency of conda and cannot be removed from conda's operating environment

Question

I am trying to install and update packages on Ananconda 3.7 on Windows 10.

When I ran the code:

 conda update --all

or even

 conda install pandas

I got the following error:

 RemoveError: 'pyopenssl' is a dependency of conda and cannot be removed from conda's operating environment

I am not sure why this is? also not sure if this pyopenssl package should be removed if it is going to help in anyways.

Answer 1

I came up with the same problem today, and the solution is quite simple:

conda deactivate
conda install --force-reinstall conda

As the error message says, 'pyopenssl' is a dependency of conda. So I came up with the idea of force reinstalling conda, thus ignoring the dependency loop. And you have to deactivate the env, otherwise conda would complain not able to update itself when virtual env is still active.