Guido> Again, I won't have time to do this until after I'm back from Guido> Python UK, so I'd appreciate it if someone helped with this, Guido> e.g. by filing a patch. Skip> I'll take a look. I attached a patch to http://www.python.org/sf/707074 which makes the socket wrapper unconditional, and added a new test case (test_urllibnet.py - requires the 'network' resource) which fails before applying the patch and succeeds afterward. Would someone else like to take a look at it? Guido's the natural candidate, but is busy with near-term conferences. Thx, Skip