urllib error on urlopen

[Mike Driscoll]

Hi,

I have been using the following code for over a year in one of my
programs:

f = urllib2.urlopen('https://www.companywebsite.com/somestring')

It worked great until the middle of the afternoon yesterday. Now I get
the following traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#13>", line 1, in <module>
    response = urllib2.urlopen(req).read().strip()
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data)
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 381, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 399, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 360, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1115, in https_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPSConnection, req)
  File "c:\python25\lib\urllib2.py", line 1082, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
URLError: <urlopen error (1, 'error:140770FC:SSL
routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol')>


I tried my Google Fu on this error, but there's not much out there. I
tried using a proxy in Python, but that returned the same traceback.
If I copy the URL into my browser, it resolves correctly. Does anyone
have any advice on how to troubleshoot this error?

I am using Python 2.5.2 on Windows XP.

Thanks,

Mike