Is there actually a good reason not to do `from picard import config` at the start of file?
It's not like this loads an optional module or starts something really big.
Similar with `from PyQt4.QtCore import QIODevice, QString`.

`from ctypes import windll` is different, since that is only available on Windows. Testing sys.platform and importing it at the start of the file when it is win32 is still an option.