I discovered much to my chagrin today that the socket module's new timeout capability doesn't play well with file objects as returned by a socket's makefile method. Tim O'Malley's timeoutsocket module avoids this problem by implementing a simple file-like object directly on top of the socket without calling makefile(). Is there some reason this approach wasn't adopted when adding timeouts to the socket module? I would think the greatest use of timeouts would be using higher-level line-oriented modules like urllib and ftplib. In addition, since makefile() isn't always available, it seems worthwhile to implement something in socket.py, thus making makefile() universally available. I filed a bug report about this issue earlier today in case people are interested: http://www.python.org/sf/707074 Skip