Problem with AccountHashGenerator(config)

[Akkana Peck <akkana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just discovered offlineimap.  It does a nice job and solves a
problem I've been wanting to solve for a long time!  

At least, on Debian (testing) with apt-get, it does.
But I want to read my mail on a number of different machines, not
all of which are Debian, so I downloaded the latest 3.99.18 tarball
to install on a Redhat 8 machine.  (Any particular reason that
3.99.18 calls itself 3.99.17 in the version strings?)

But it doesn't run: it dies in init.startup, on line 108 of init.py
because the line:
    allaccounts = accounts.AccountHashGenerator(config)
returned nothing, so allaccounts is null, and when the active
accounts are compared against it, python bombs out with a "KeyError".

I checked the version I had running on Debian (from apt-get) and
discovered it was only 3.99.10, but it turns out that version isn't
available on the web site.  3.99.12 is, but it has the same problem
17-18 has.  So I tried copying the Debian python files over to my
Redhat machine, and the problem went away.  (But when I ran the
program, it didn't sync right.  I think I may be missing something
else because I didn't go through a proper install procedure.)

Before I dig into this any further, is this a known problem? 
Is there a solution or a workaround?  I'm an instant offlineimap
convert (read my mail on my laptop with mutt today, it was great :-)
so I really want to find a way to make it work on all my machines.
I don't mind doing some debugging, but if someone who understands
AccountHashGenerator could help, that would be much appreciated!

        ...Akkana