SQLAlchemy example not working on Windows, but on Ubuntu with Docker

Question

the code below works fine in a docker container on ubuntu, even without the import of pymssql. but does not on Windows (without docker). both target the same database server.

the problems comes from engine.connect() which seems to run very long....

pip lists pymssql as well mssql.

any ideas, at least how to debug it?

thanks in advance for any hints

import streamlit as st
import pandas as pd
import pymssql
from sqlalchemy import create_engine, text

# specify the connection string
server = "SRV-SQL\\xxx"
database = "xxx"
user = "xxx"
password = "xxx"

# Create an engine
engine = create_engine(f'mssql+pymssql://{user}:{password}@{server}/{database}')

# create a connection
connection = engine.connect()

# Define the query
query = text("SELECT ProductNumber, Matchcode FROM ASEArtikel WHERE ProductNumber = 'A000001' OR ProductNumber = 'A000003'")
# use the read_sql_query() function to read the data from the query to a dataframe
df = pd.read_sql_query(query, connection)
# close the connection
connection.close()

st.dataframe(df)