> I'd really love to understand what the state of the TCP connection 
> is here. I'm presuming that it's still open, because otherwise you'd 
> get a different error from OpenSSL.  So what's the error that's 
> triggering this call?  Is it simply that the sender has run out of 
> stuff to send?

"almost closed"? :)
I don't know but I wouldn't label this as an "unexpected error" because when dealing with non blocking sockets errors like this one are perfectly legitimate as they "tell" the upper application what it is expected to do (for example EWOULDBLOCK on send() means "retry later").

A patch is in attachment but I have not been able to reproduce this issue on python 2.7 r78878 on Ubuntu 8.04 so it might not work (I suspect it might end up in an endless loop).

If this doesn't work we can try the second option of calling handle_read/write right after shutdown().