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I haven't had any spare cycles to devote to urllib2 this
year.  Perhaps Moshe can be of more help in the near term. 
Following the 2.1 release, I may have more time.

I never used urllib2 it a situation that produced anything
other than vanilla responses -- 200, 401, etc.  I'm not to
surprised to hear that there are problems with 2XX cases.

Can you post some examples of the sorts of things you want
to do?  It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but some code
would help.  If not in this patch archive, perhaps on
comp.lang.python?