first of all don't worry about your money you still own the bitcoins that you have bought and can access them as long as you have backed up your Electrum seed and as long as the address was from this wallet seed (meaning if you haven't copied a wrong one from elsewhere). even if you could never get Electrum to connect, you still can spend them.
with that said, there has been a problem with Electrum when it is first synchronizing. when you first run Electrum it has to download a file called blockchain_headers which is currently at 42.4 MB and depending on your internet speed and connectivity it can take a while to sync. i have also noticed that if the internet is very slow then it won't be able to build the chunks and the file.
if you can monitor your traffic see if Electrum is even receiving anything. you can also go to your application data folder (paste this in your windows explorer %APPDATA%\Electrum) and see the file and its size.
Aaaaand I didn't realise I would need python or anything. All the articles I read about which wallet to use pretty much said electrum was the easiest and made it seem like plug n play.
if you have already opened Electrum, created a new wallet and acquired an address which you used to receive bitcoins when you bought them, then you don't have any problems with python or anything. you already have all the dependencies!