Problem solved.
Turns out it was a problem of mistranslating VBS code to Python.
The PYTHON line "print str(tet)" casts tet to a string and prints. This
is what I thought the VBS line "Str = Tet.ConvertToString()" was doing.
But of course "ConvertToString()" is a method of a Tet instance. So in
python the correct line should have been "print tet.ConvertToString".
Learning all the time.