Why does this fail?

[Skip Montanaro]

    John> Also (advert ;-), if you're doing any kind of web scraping in
    John> Python (including functional testing), you might want to look at
    John> this little FAQ (though it certainly doesn't nearly cover
    John> everything relevant):

    John> http://wwwsearch.sf.net/bits/clientx.html

A possible addition to your "Embedded script is messing up my web-scraping"
section:  Wasn't there mention of the Mozilla project's standalone
JavaScript interpreter (don't remember what it's called) recently alongside
some Python interface?

Skip