ok, thanks for all the suggestions, gents, i clearly have more to read on this. i have discovered that the server will send a request for the heartbeat ping if its almost timed out, so i use the length of the message to determine what to do with it.
msg = sockobj.recv(1024) if len(msg) == 158: record the data elif len(msg) == (34): # length of request for ping ping the server else: yada yada. each real message ( according to their docs ) should be exactly 158 bytes. i know i need to look more into all of this.. but thanks for all of your help -shawn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list