If your task is indeed to watch a directory for "activity" and thenact upon this activity then you would be much better of doing what Lawrence suggests. For linux there is the inotify bit in the kernel. As you are using win32com I'll assume you are using windows.
This snippet in the cookbook seems to do the job http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/156178 if it doesn't do exactly what you wnat have a poke around win32 tim -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
