Finally I managed to get pylucene working on my windows7 machine,
Which raised a more general question:
How come that when I have a dll on a directory in the path, python couldn't find it,
and when I put the dll in c:\windows\system32 - it did work?
Using windows 7 32 bit
The answer is probably, that if something like that happens to you, there is a wrong DLL somewhere in the path that is called first (and puttting the DLL in system32 ensures it is first).
So if you put the relevant DLL in your PATH - make sure it is the first (or look into each element to find out who is getting ahead of you)
Answered myself for future reference for people