I finally got emacs working properly with the excellent company-mode. But I have to think this guy:
http://www.enigmacurry.com/2009/01/21/autocompleteel-python-code-completion-in-emacs/
For some reason the rope/ropemacs/ropemode documentation is pretty inconsistent and hard to find. Installing it from mercurial as described in the article above did it.
company-mode supports rope and pysmell now out of the box.
See my emacs python integration here:
http://richardriley.net/projects/emacs/dotprogramming
rope etc is loaded by company-mode.
