Socket read weirdness

[Casey Crabb]

Ok, I have discovered a strange issue with sockets:
Here's the situation:
 I am in X, or windows, and have a term open running a command-line
python program
 I have a thread which is reading from the socket.
 If I resize the terminal the read from the socket is broken:
 I am returned a socket.error, (4, 'Interrupted system call'),
<traceback object at 0x82deb88>
 The also occurs if I restart my window manager (FVWM2)
My question is: What does resizing the window running a command-line
python application have to do with reading from a socket?

Any insight would be most appreciated,

Casey