Timings on Win98SE are, in my repeated experience, extremely erratic and often counter-intuitive. On Win9x and Linux boxes in the 800Mhz range, it takes about 2 seconds to complete. I have no explanation for any of this, and since I can't look at the Windows source code probably never will. That forces Python to allocate and crawl over a 200Mb chunk of memory. Distutils is in the process of solving that one.
Answer depends on priority.