Thanks everyone for your help. It was the "Abouttime.exe" program, a time synch utility. To get the problem, you have to run it as a service, and possibly it has to have trouble connecting to its time servers. It would cause time.sleep(1) to sometimes block for 200 seconds. Not "about" 200 seconds but always within 199 to 202 seconds. Very strange, but it is good to have the problem gone.
Enjoy the weekend! Paul Probert University of Wisconsin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
