trouble importing module _socket

[Alex]

What are you trying to install python from?  It sounds like it didn't
include the _socket builtin.  If you didn't build it from the source,
I'd try this:

wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.1/Python-2.1.tgz
tar zxf Python-2.1.tgz
cd Python-2.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install

(note that this will overwrite your previous installation of python2.1.)

HTH.
Alex.