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I'm seeing this with Python 2.3.5 and 2.4.3 hitting a PHP
app and getting a large error page.  It looks as though the
server is incorrectly chunking the response: lwp-request at
least gives a better error message than httplib.py:

  $ GET "http://..."
  500 EOF when chunk header expected

I'm unclear on precisely what the server is doing wrong. 
The response looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:18:47 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

2169\r\n
\r\n
[...first 0x2169 bytes of response...]\r\n
20b2\r\n
[...next 0x20b2 bytes...]
[...repeat many times...]
20b2\r\n
[...the last 0x20b2 bytes...]
\r\n

The blank line at eof appears to be confusing httplib.py: it
bombs because 

  int('', 16)

raises ValueError.

Observation #1: if this is indeed a protocol error (ie. the
server is in the wrong), httplib.py should turn the
ValueError into an HTTPException.  Perhaps it should define
a new exception class for low-level protocol errors (bad
chunking).  Maybe it should reuse IncompleteRead.

Observation #2: gee, my web browser doesn't barf on this
response, so why should httplib.py?  If there is an error
here, it's at EOF, so it's not that big a deal.