Finally, I can download the much talked about 'Iron Python'.
This is a .Net implementation of Python, which claims to be "up to 1.7x faster than Python-2.3 on the standard pystone benchmark."
I look forward to trying this one out :)
http://www.ironpython.com/
p.s. From an earlier post, I was pointed to Zope (http://www.zope.org/Members/Brian/PythonNet/index_html) , to show that there are alternatives out there. I think I will try them both out together this week.