Overhead of individual python apps

[Qopit]

I'm setting up a system that consists of several small python
applications that all communicate amongst each other on the same pc.

When running in Windows, launching each application generates a
process, and each of those processes ends up taking up > 4MB of system
memory.  This memory usage is as reported by the Windows Task manager
for the python.exe image name.

My Question: Is there any way to reduce this per-process overhead?  eg:
can you set it somehow so that one python.exe instance handles multiple
processes?

One possibility considered is to run them as threads of a single
process rather than multiple processes, but this has other drawbacks
for my application and I'd rather not,

Another possibility I considered is to strip out all but the most
essential imports in each app, but I tested this out and it has
marginal benefits.  I demonstrated to myself that a simple one liner
app consisting of 'x = raw_input()' still eats up > 2.7MB .

I also tried -O but it, not surprisingly, did nothing for the
one-liner.

I'm simply running the .py files and I am still on v2.3

All help appreciated!

Thanks,
Russ