Using Python 2.3.3 on Win2K and Win98 the urllib module
does not seem to support proxies as described in the
documentation.

I have the http_proxy environment variable set and
urllib2.urlopen can successfully access the web via the
proxy.
Trying urllib.urlopen results in a
IOError: [Errno socket error] (7, 'getaddrinfo failed')
exception which suggests that it is not using the proxy.
This occurs both with an explicit proxy defined and
when using the environment variable.

See attached file for an example script.

I could not see any reference to proxies in the urllib
test script so I wonder whether this has been tested.

I have not (yet) tried to investigate why this does not
work.