I upgraded my IronPython version to 1.0 and decided to give testlist.py a go. IronPython outperforms CPython.
On my core duo laptop running Windows 2003 server on VMWare: 34 secs for IronPython. 54 secs for CPython. Scripting on VMs is for real.
Incidentally, CPython was faster than the old version of IronPython I was running, so some improvements must have been made.