More info (none good, but some worse so boosted priority):

+ Happens under release and debug builds.

+ Have not been able to provoke when starting in the debugger.

+ Ctrl+Alt+Del and killing Winoldap is not enough to clean everything up.  There's still a Python (or Python_d) process hanging around that Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't show.

+ This process makes it impossible to delete the associated Python .dll, and in particular makes it impossible to rebuild Python successfully without a reboot.

+ These processes cannot be killed!  Wintop and Process Viewer both fail to get the job done.  PrcView (a freeware process viewer) itself locks up if I try to kill them using it.  Process Viewer freezes for several seconds before giving up.

+ Attempting to attach to the process with the MSVC debugger (in order to find out what the heck it's doing) finds the process OK, but then yields the cryptic and undocumented error msg "Cannot execute program".

+ The processes are not accumulating cycles.

+ Smells like deadlock.