Yes, on looking into it, sockets.ssl is not installed with activepython, so it doesn't recognise https. So I have removed it, and reinstalled the v 2.4.1 which I downloaded from www.python.org . This leaves me with with the problem where the script 'hangs' for a long time, then returns:
Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Documents and Settings\rhall\Desktop\software\python\auth_example_5.py", line 18, in ? f = urllib2.urlopen('https://www.directshares.com.au/') File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 130, in urlopen return _opener.open(url, data) File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 358, in open response = self._open(req, data) File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 376, in _open '_open', req) File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 337, in _call_chain result = func(*args) File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 1029, in https_open return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPSConnection, req) File "C:\Python24\Lib\urllib2.py", line 996, in do_open raise URLError(err) URLError: <urlopen error (8, 'EOF occurred in violation of protocol')> I'm stuck... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list