Jared,
1) As long as the DLL is loaded, if you have opened the device via the saOpenDevice function, you will not be able to open the device again until either, you close the device, or unload the DLL. We have seen some environments like Matlab/Labview keep the DLLs loaded until you restart the environment. One way customers have got around this is by closing all possible device handles before their script starts, this ensures any open devices from a previous run close. If you are interfacing a single device, the handle will always be 0, so you can just call saCloseDevice(0) at the beginning of your script and that should make it available again.
2) The Python libraries may not stay completely up to date with the C ones. You can just add the function to the python interface. I believe we have implemented this function for the BB and/or SM200 APIs, you could check the python interfaces for an example of how to do it.
Here is how it is done in the SMAPI, this is defined in the sm_api.py file alongside the other function definitions.
smGetDeviceList = smlib.smGetDeviceList
smGetDeviceList.argtypes = [
numpy.ctypeslib.ndpointer(c_int, ndim=1, flags=’C’),
POINTER(c_int)
]
