Your editing explains the behavior you are observing.
You need to disable PYTHONPATH when virtualenv is activated.
unset PYTHONPATH source /path/to/virtualenv/bin/activate
virtualenv --no-site-packages ENV creates an empty virtualenv just fine, but your PYTHONPATH export drops an empty virtualenv pool.
To make things easier, you can simply edit the activate script and add the unset PYTHONPATH . If you want to restore the original PYTHONPATH when virtualenv is deactivated, you also need to change the deactivate function in this file.
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