I have been running into problems with the NEAR tool in python for 6 months. Some times it works but mostly it hangs when running the near. Sometimes it will run the first near, but the second near hangs.
I've tried everything I can think of to get it to work. Repairing the featureclasses, running the nears on layers and not the FC's. Copying the featureclasses into feature datasets with different tollerances / resolutions, copying them into new clean FGDB's with nothing else in them.
I've tried using different geoprocessing objects (arcpy.Near vs gp.near)
Nothing consistently fixes the problem. It's crazy the number of hours I've spent on this problem.