urllib proxy question

[Julius Welby]

At work I'm running Python 2.1 on W2k and using IE5.5 as my web browser.

To access the web I have to go through a proxy server, which requires
authentication.

Problem: For a particular project, I want to access URL's on our *local*
network, not on the web.

If I have a proxy set in IE5.5, I cant use urllib.urlopen to connect to a
local resource, even though I've set IE not to use the proxy for local
addresses, and specified the servers concerned in the "Do not use proxy
server for addresses begining with:" field. (Belt and braces? Probably.)

To sucessfully use Python to access local pages I have to turn off the "Use
proxy server" setting in IE5.5, so I can't use the web while I'm working
with Python. This is becoming more of a problem as I want to be able to run
Python based web services off my PC.

Can anybody give me any guidance how I can stop IE5.5 settings affecting
urllib.urlopen, or even getting Python to recognise all of the settings (so
not trying to use the proxy for local URLs)?