Bob> The one I used was http://dreamcast.ign.com/review_lists/a.html, Bob> but probably any would do since it's pretty ordinary, and the error Bob> occurs before making any contact with the destination. Bob> By the way, I forgot to mention that I'm running under Windows 2000. Bob, Thanks for the input. I asked for a URL because I thought it unlikely something common would trigger a bug. After all, urllib.urlopen is probably one of the most frequently used Internet-related calls in Python. I can't reproduce this on my Linux system: % ./python Python 2.0b1 (#6, Sep 7 2000, 21:03:08) [GCC 2.95.3 19991030 (prerelease)] on linux2 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import urllib >>> f = urllib.urlopen("http://dreamcast.ign.com/review_lists/a.html") >>> data = f.read() >>> len(data) Perhaps one of the folks on python-dev that run Windows of some flavor can reproduce the problem. Can you give me a simple session transcript like the above that fails for you? I will see about adding a test to the urllib regression test. -- Skip Montanaro (skip@mojam.com) http://www.mojam.com/ http://www.musi-cal.com/