Connecting to IP address w/proxy?

[Hans Nowak]

Howdy y'all,

I wrote a nice little chat program in Python, which uses connection to
an IP address. For completeness, some relevant code excerpts follow
here. It's no heavy wizardry. :)

    def listen(self):
        """ Start connection as a server. """
        if self._connected:
            raise ConnectionError, "Already connected"
        s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
        HOST = ''
        print self.port
        s.bind(HOST, self.port)
        s.listen(1)
        self.conn, self.addr = s.accept()
        self.conn.setblocking(0)
        self._connected = 1
        # make sure we poll the server after <poll_period> seconds:
        self.listenID = self.after(self.poll_period, self.poll_server)

    def connect(self, host='127.0.0.1'):
        """ Start connection as a client. """
        if self._connected:
            raise ConnectionError, "Already connected"
        s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
        s.connect(host, self.port)
        s.setblocking(0)
        self._connected = 1
        self.conn = s
        self.addr = host
        self.listenID = self.after(self.poll_period, self.poll_server)

Now this worked fine and dandy, until some #&@(#) installed a proxy
server. And now I obviously cannot connect to an IP address anymore,
among other things. So my question is, is there a way to connect to an
address through the proxy? I had a similar problem with my webcrawler,
but the proxy settings in urllib were easy to find out, so that's solved
now. I wondered if there's a similar solution for direct connections.
Anyone did this? Otherwise, does anyone know of a way around this?

TIA,

--Hans Nowak