I think the point is that we don't want to be grabbing settings like this from other configuration locations. Ideally, there'd be a way to provide a list of "don't bypass the proxy for these names", which a caller could then read from the IE configuration if they want.

The other part of the problem is it seems that nobody on this thread (apart from perhaps you) understands exactly what's going on here :) You may want to post to python-dev and see if anyone who understands the intricacies of how gethostbyaddr() should/does work is willing to chime in.