I, for one, would actually prefer if global options were parsed by default and MissingSectionHeaderError was deprecated instead.
From what little specification available, INI format does **not** require options be in sections [4, 5].

Additionally, "Linux and Unix systems also use a similar file format for system configuration" [6] and allowing global options being a (very sane) default would nicely fill this use case as well.

In general, the format is not well defined [6], so choice of name `strict` for an argument is kind of odd too. What is it conforming to?

It may be my sole opinion that parsing global options by default into a '' (or appropriate) section and deprecating MissingSectionHeaderError would benefit everyone [2, 9] and hinder few if any one at all [8, 9]. YMMV.

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file#Sections
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file#Global_properties
[6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file
[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file#Varying_features
[8]: http://nullege.com/pages/noresult/MissingSectionHeaderError
[9]: https://github.com/search?l=python&q=MissingSectionHeaderError&type=Code