I'm hoping to draw somebody's attention to this before it's too late. This affects multiple stdlib modules: http://bugs.python.org/issue2451 """ The new timeout support in 2.6 makes use of new function socket.create_connection(). socket.create_connection() provides no way to disable timeouts, other than by relying on socket.getdefaulttimeout() returning None. This is unfortunate, because it was the purpose of the new timeout support to allow control of timeouts without reliance on global state. """ The author of the patch that introduced this problem (Facundo Batista) has admitted that the behaviour he implemented does not match the discussion about the feature that took place on python-dev, but has not found time to review my patch in the last two months. I fear this broken API will make it into 2.6 (and 3.0?). More could be done here re other issues introduced by the patch (I've listed those that I noticed on issue 2451 -- including at least one other API issue), but the patch attached to issue2451 at least resolves the most clear-cut problem. Thanks John