Well I'm totally foxed by this.

I did wonder if it was something to do with my home - 54 Mbps wireless - network being such a mixed bag; 1 Athlon 2000+ mobile running XP Pro, 1 Athlon 1600+ running W2K Pro and 1 P4 2.7 running XPMCE. Over the weekend I took Vue to my office and set up a farm over 5 identical P4 3 GHz - all running XP Pro SP2 - across a 100 Mbps Cat 5e LAN, and got the same results I got at home.

I have no problems if I don't run Python scripts, though sending textures to the cows seems to take a ridiculously long time on my wireless LAN, I give up!