Hi Mark,
For us, our license server is in the USA, whereas we work in the UK. We notice that the script above can on a good day, run in approx 5 seconds. But when our LAN is slow, it can take 30-45 seconds, which when your changing 1 charecter in a script can be frustrating.
Checking out (borrowing) the license using Adminstrator may help, havent actually tried it! (Dont do much python at the moment sadly)