The cause of the problem was some python comments in the top of the keras.py file that configures it to use Theano as the backend.
Once I deleted those comments, the import of keras is successful. 
I followed the step by step Theano and Keras installation instructions for windows 10 as per the suggested resource at http://ankivil.com/installing-keras-theano-and-dependencies-on-windows-10/
Everything worked fine, until it came to testing the keras installation. That’s when I get this error when just executing the import keras command inside the test py file. What else can I do to troubleshoot this?
import keras
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
import keras
File “C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\keras\keras_init_.py”, line 2, in
from . import backend
File “C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\keras\keras\backend_init_.py”, line 31, in
_config = json.load(open(_config_path))
File “C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\lib\json_init_.py”, line 268, in load
parse_constant=parse_constant, object_pairs_hook=object_pairs_hook, **kw)
File “C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\lib\json_init_.py”, line 319, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File “C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\lib\json\decoder.py”, line 342, in decode
raise JSONDecodeError(“Extra data”, s, end)
JSONDecodeError: Extra data