urllib.urlopen + https = all threads locked?

[Jeff Johnson]

I have a multi-threaded application that makes calls
urllib.urlopen("https://yadayada.com").  Until the call completes (or
maybe the following read) all other threads just freeze.  They
continue working after the call completes so it took me a while to
realize there was a problem.

Someone suggested:

"Sounds like the C code that does the SSL is not _releasing_ 
the global thread lock."

I'm using python SSL that comes with Python 2.1.1 on FreeBSD 4.3.

I searched usenet and everywhere else I could think of but only found
one usenet post about broken ThreadingMixin know to be broken in
2.1.1c but I'm not sure if this is related.

Any suggestions?  Is this a known problem?

Thanks,
Jeff