Thanks for your suggestion nc50lc. I tried your suggestion but electrum crashes whether restoring wallet or creating new wallet the following error:
 python electrum.py create
Password (hit return if you do not wish to encrypt your wallet):
in order to use wallet encryption, please install pycrypto  (sudo easy_install pycrypto)
server (default:ecdsa.org):
port (default:50000):
fee (default 0.005):
if you are restoring an existing wallet, enter the seed. otherwise just press enter:
Your seed is 12f2458bab0372ecc4d2097f0df39167
Please store it safely
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "electrum.py", line 715, in <module>
    wallet.create_new_address(False, None)
  File "electrum.py", line 295, in create_new_address
    secexp = ecdsa.util.randrange_from_seed__trytryagain( seed, order )
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ecdsa/util.py", line 193, in randrange_from_seed__trytryagain
    extrabyte = int2byte(ord(generate(1)) & lsb_of_ones(extrabits))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ecdsa/util.py", line 98, in __call__
    a = [next(self.generator) for i in range(numbytes)]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ecdsa/util.py", line 109, in block_generator
    ("prng-%d-%s" % (counter, seed)).encode()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb6 in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

I tried to reach out to thomasv; however it said he does not accept messages from newbies. So I'm wondering if one of you guys can point him out to this post.
I feel like we're getting close to solving this mystery.