Christian -

Thank you for this.  I did as you suggested however, I still have the same problem.  As I pointed out in my original message, the problem does not exist if I insert a sleep(1) statement prior to returning from the function.  Additional to that, I previously had printf('.') statement in place of the sleep statement.  When I ran 10,000 iterations in python and printed my pass/fail totals, I still had a few hundred dots print which tells me that there has to be some sort of timing or buffer transfer issue between c and python.  Does that make sense?