Python startup seems slow... (NT)

[Jason Taylor]

Under NT, it seems that starting up python to process even a trivial 
script is pretty slow.  With the following python program, 
helloworld.py:

  print "Hello World"

it takes a second or more for "python helloworld.py" to execute on my 
machine.  It doesn't get any faster the second or third time around.

Curious, I used the same program with Perl.  It had basically no delay.

This is a problem for me because I have a python script which needs to 
be called repeatedly from another language.  I could use Perl, but I 
would rather not :)

Is there anything I can do to improve the performance?  Is this a known 
problem?

Thanks!
Jason Taylor