Django only seems to allow one project's models at once

I'm working in Django and I have 2 apps (monitor and maintenance) in a single project. I can't seem to figure out why when one app's models.py is working, the other one doesn't. Here's my debug output, but it doesn't seem to make any sense because I AM setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. Both apps worked until I added models to one of them. Then "monitor" died. When I changed the models in monitor, maintenance had this happen.

Debug output:

    Connected to pydev debugger (build 139.1659)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\PyCharm 4.0.6\helpers\pydev\pydevd.py", line 2217, in <module>
    globals = debugger.run(setup['file'], None, None)
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\PyCharm 4.0.6\helpers\pydev\pydevd.py", line 1643, in run
    pydev_imports.execfile(file, globals, locals)  # execute the script
  File "C:/REPOS/client-product-controller/Web/myproject/maintenance/views.py", line 4, in <module>
    from models import Control
  File "C:/REPOS/client-product-controller/Web/myproject/maintenance\models.py", line 5, in <module>
    class Control(models.Model):
  File "C:/REPOS/client-product-controller/Web/myproject/maintenance\models.py", line 6, in Control
    control_label = models.CharField(max_length=200)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\db\models\fields\__init__.py", line 1081, in __init__
    super(CharField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\db\models\fields\__init__.py", line 161, in __init__
    self.db_tablespace = db_tablespace or settings.DEFAULT_INDEX_TABLESPACE
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\conf\__init__.py", line 48, in __getattr__
    self._setup(name)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\django\conf\__init__.py", line 42, in _setup
    % (desc, ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE))
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting DEFAULT_INDEX_TABLESPACE, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

here's my wsgi.py

    import os
# import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "myproject.settings")

application = get_wsgi_application()

and in my maintenance/views.py

...    
from models import Control
..

and in my maintenance/models.py

...
class Control(models.Model):
    control_label = models.CharField(max_length=200)
...

I haven't changed any code in maintenance. and the SAME error was happening in monitor just moments ago. I'm not sure what changed, but I did do a migration and syncdb