After shutting down and later powering up the machine that experienced the problem, I have been unable to reproduce it.
It was reproducible before shutting down though, and came and went as I removed and re-inserted the line mentioned above.
I think I need to find why a URL needed to be fetched at all, rather than trying to block it in cssutils.
Perhaps there are still some upgrade checks that need to be removed from Calibre.
After shutting down and later powering up the machine that experienced the problem, I have been unable to reproduce it.
It was reproducible before shutting down though, and came and went as I removed and re-inserted the line mentioned above.
I think I need to find why a URL needed to be fetched at all, rather than trying to block it in cssutils.
Perhaps there are still some upgrade checks that need to be removed from Calibre.