Guido> I'm not going to change ftplib.py and all the others. >> Also understood. This has, as far as I know, been the response of >> everybody who has encountered this problem before. Martin> You should read your SF bug list more frequently, then. You are Martin> currently assigned bug #723312 (and have been since 2003-04-17), Martin> which has a patch to change ftplib. I updated the patch to be compatible with current svn: http://python.org/sf/723312 All tests pass. Well, the only tests which fail for me seem to have nothing to do with networking. I looked at gopherlib for about five seconds then decided it wasn't worth it. (Shouldn't it be deprecated and moved out to PyPI for external maintenance?) There are still no documentation updates. I don't have the few minutes necessary at the present time to cobble something together (headed out the door). Maybe tomorrow. Guido, I looked at urllib2 and quickly gave up. I have no idea how that code works (where is a lower level library's connection object instantiated, for example?). I presume with timeouts in the lower level libraries someone who knows how urllib2 works will be able to graft timeouts onto it without too much work. Skip