I recently converted a project from using a custom  implementation of 
xml.dom.minidom to using EelemntTree that comes with python2.5+ and 
found myself wishing for a find(tag_or_path) method that would do so iteratively instead of just on the current elements direct children. 
This is possible with the code as written;

looking_for = None
for el in etree.getiterator(tag_or_path):
    looking_for = el
    break

I have to do this type of action so often in my code that I just decided 
to grab the python implementation of etree that came with py2.6 and 
include it with my app and patch in an iter_find method as the instant 
break for loop is just asking for maintenance issues down the road what 
I forget why I was breaking on the first loop no matter what.

second patch file

@Digitalxero: could you provide an updated unit test file please.

ElementTree 1.3 added the "iterfind" method to Python 2.7 and 3.2.
http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.iterfind