Batch STL

I have been learning Blender for a while and have found it to be an amazing application.
We use Blender for rendering products we design at Formworks Product Design where I work. Our products are modelled using parametric cad packages (we use both Solidworks and ProEngineer) so we can generate part files to send them out for tooling.
The easiest way to get an assembly out of our cad packages and into blender as a mesh is using the .stl format which is meant for rapid prototyping but in my experience has given the best results for transferring files to rendering packages.
The main problem I have faced in using Blender to render our products is lack of a batch import function, some of our products have several hundred components so it can get a bit boring/frustrating importing them using File>Import>STL...

As Blender has support for python writing your own import script is pretty easy. I hacked together the batch_stl.py script by creating a loop around an stl import fucntion.
I couldn't find an stl import script for binary stl files (which are smaller and my preferred format over ASCII) so I wrote my own which turned out to be very easy even with my lack of python and blender api experience.
I borrowed some code from the .slp import function which does a nice job of eliminating duplicate vertices (thanks Anthony D'Agostino) and ended up with this batch_stl.py script.

Here it is batch_stl.py I hope someone else finds it useful.