Message4000

Socket timeouts are not honoured when the timeouts is set through
socket.setdefaulttimeout.

This code illustrates

######
import socket
import urllib2

socket.setdefaulttimeout(1.0)
print "Connecting ..."
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect( ("192.168.192.168", 80) )
print "Never reached"
######

This means that modules and functions which use sockets, such as
urllib.urlopen, will fail to correctly timeout.