Okay, problem solved. My thanks to Chris Barker over on the Anaconda group for help. (I originally thought there might be something amiss with the pytz package in Anaconda, as our older non-Anaconda Python seemed not to have the problem.) It turns out to be a problem I solved several years ago at my previous employer (but forgot I had solved, and for perhaps obvious reasons, I wasn't able to take my solution with me - another advantage for open source...). It all boils down to the difference between these two operations:
now.replace(tzinfo=eastern_tz) eastern_tz.astimezone(now) where now is datetime.datetime.now() and eastern_tz is pytz.timezone("America/Eastern"). So, my problem has (again) been solved. A colleague here has suggested arrow <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/arrow/0.10.0> as an alternative to datetime+pytz, which I will look into during the slow period next week. Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list