Thanks for that. The output is very telling.

First, it shows there's a bug in the test script where an exception occurs when it succeeds because a .pyc file is created and not properly cleaned up.

Second, it demonstrates that the bug as I reported it is not occurring in your environment.

This latter result tells me that I may be experiencing the same issue as you, but encountered it almost two years ago. This finding leads me to believe that the issue is less about the latest hotfix and more related to the VS redistributables. I almost certainly have some form of these redistributables installed as I usually have some form of Visual Studio installed.

The fact that it works in one environment and not another means I should be able to find the regression. I'll install a barebones Windows box and see how it behaves there.