Here's just about the simplest open and close you can do with webdriver and phantom:

    from selenium import webdriver
    crawler = webdriver.PhantomJS()
    crawler.set_window_size(1024,768)
    crawler.get('https://www.google.com/')
    crawler.quit()

On windows (7), every time I run my code to test something out, new instances of the conhost.exe and phantomjs.exe processes begin and never quit. Am I doing something stupid here? I figured the processes would quit when the crawler.quit() did...
Go figure. Problem resolved with a reboot.
Selenium webdriver + PhantomJS processes not closing