Possible mitigation for Python smoke flakes

[itowlson]

[rylev]

@itowlson what is the status of this PR? I'm not sure why it's marked as a draft.

[itowlson]

@rylev It's having the tests run on a regular schedule of "when I remember" to see if the flake still happens. I don't have a lot of faith that this will really fix it, but the flake is intermittent enough that it's hard to know if it's made a difference. ~Shall I close it?~ I guess there is not much to do except close it for lack of evidence, or merge it and risk the flake coming back - open to people's preferences.

[itowlson]

I got it to flake... but it flaked on Vault not on Python. Fie!