>Well, there should be no memory difference between the two methods after
>the statement is executed.  All that happens is that the sys module gets an
>extra +1 to its reference count.

This is in general dependent on what happens when one imports a module though right? I think for sys this is a non-issue but there are packages that have classes and such that keep track of per import module states where an import could do more than just add reference counts to a module.