neo4j query running slowly in Python for Windows - neo4j

Question

I'm developing locally on a Windows 10 machine using Python 2.7. I'm using Neo4j 3.0.5 with the Bolt driver for Python.
Connection string is as follows:
db = GraphDatabase.driver("bolt://localhost:7687", auth=basic_auth("USERNAME", "PASSWORD"), encrypted=False)
When running queries I'm using the following syntax:
with db.session() as s:
with s.begin_transaction() as tx:
results = tx.run(
"MATCH (a:User{username:{username}}) RETURN a.username",
{
"username": username
})
For some reason there is about a 2 second latency.
I ran the following tests (with slightly different syntax, but exactly the same result) and the slow elements seem to be loading the database driver and then the FIRST run of the session.
from neo4j.v1 import GraphDatabase
import timeit
start_time = 0
elapsed = 0
task = ""
def startTimer(taskIn):
global task
global start_time
task = taskIn
start_time = timeit.default_timer()
def endTimer():
global task
global start_time
global elapsed
elapsed = round(timeit.default_timer() - start_time, 3)
print(task, elapsed)
startTimer("GraphDatabase.driver")
db = GraphDatabase.driver("bolt://localhost:7687", auth=("USERNAME", "PASSWORD"))
endTimer()
startTimer("db.session")
session = db.session()
endTimer()
startTimer("query1")
result = session.run(
"MATCH (a:User{username:{username}}) RETURN a.username, a.password_hash ",
{"username": "Pingu"})
endTimer()
startTimer("query2")
result = session.run(
"MATCH (a:User{username:{username}}) RETURN a.username, a.password_hash ",
{"username": "Pingu"})
endTimer()
startTimer("db.close")
session.close()
endTimer()
The results were as follow:
('GraphDatabase.driver', 1.308)
('db.session', 0.0)
('query1', 1.017)
('query2', 0.001)
('db.close', 0.009)
The string is the test step and the number is the number of seconds for execution.
I'm developing a Flask API and so I can get past the database driver load time by loading it once and then referencing the loaded instance.
However, I can't seem to get past the query1 issue.
Running the exact same code on an Ubuntu Server Virtual box runs like lightening, so this seems to be something to do with Windows implementation.
Any ideas how this can be resolved please?
Thank you very much!