I fail to see the point of not using os.stat. IIUC, Windows will delete the file once the last handle is been closed. Since stat will close any handle it temporarily gets, it will not prolong the live of the file; the file will still go away when the last process has closed it.

Performance is not an issue at all here, since we are waiting for the deletion of the file anyway. So checking whether the file is in the directory listing is fine with me as well. Unless someone can demonstrate how os.stat can prevent removal of the file, I'd like to see the comment corrected, though.