I’m in the Administrators group, so it looks from that article like I can’t use symbolic links without running in an administrative prompt (which I don’t routinely do). It’s bizarre that it’s harder to use symlinks if you’re an admin than if you’re a non-admin… (I can’t add my user to the privilege, as I have a domain account). [Update: It turns out that what I need to do is switch on “Use developer features” and symlinks work fine - still not as fast as on my home PC, but as I say I put most of that down to AV and corporate lockdown]
Here is the logfile. This time it took 8 seconds, and I’d pretty much expect that if the virus scanner checks each pyd being copied, or something silly like that. Honestly, 8 seconds seems perfectly reasonable to me on that PC.
I just checked on my home PC, which has much less aggressive AV settings, and apparently has symlinks enabled, and it takes 0.8 sec to create a virtualenv. That is seriously impressive.