TEMPORARY fix to solve the failed reprogramming. Messing with sys.path caused python to consider two imports of transport.py as different modules because it was getting one from the local directory and the other from an absolute path. This means there were two defer queues, and if the wrong one happened to receive the message, it would get discarded, leaving the other one waiting indefinitely for a reply.
The sys.path code shouldn't be necessary anyway, so this is still an accident waiting to happen and needs to be refactored.