curses, multiplexing, select / poll, and resizing

[frobenius]

preface: i'm new to python, semi-new to curses, but an otherwise
experienced programmer.

i'm writing a telnet client using curses to separate input and output
into different windows.  to multiplex the I/O from the user and the
host i'm using poll().  when i resize the terminal window (i'm using
win32 PuTTY to connect to FreeBSD, running Python 2.2) i generate an
exception which kills poll():

Select Error: 4, Interrupted system call

without a useful traceback (AFAICT).

i searched online for help, found the source to cplay: a python curses
front-end to various audio apps.  in there the programmers has the
code

    signal.signal(signal.SIGWINCH, self.handler_resize)

followed by the code 

    def handler_resize(self, sig, frame):
        ## curses trickery
        curses.endwin()
        self.w.refresh()
        [more update stuff.....]

i've tried to adapt this trick to work with my program, but even
though i register a signal handler for the resize signal, the poll()
still gets a select.error exception triggered, AFTER the signal
handler has returned.

- how to i capture and ignore this w/out accidentally capturing a real
poll() error?

- as far as documentation goes, there's some serious magic with this
endwin / refresh handler trick.  (i finally found out what it does by
consulting the ncurses manpages.)  i feel like terminal window resize
issues are common enough that people should have documentation on this
somewhere, e.g. in the python curses tutorial.

- where is the curses module source?  i found the submodules
(curses.ascii, etc.) in

/usr/local/lib/python-2.2/curses/  

on my machine but can't seem to be able to find the base package
source.

- other gotchas?

thanks in advance, Frob

PS i'll probably end up contributing my python-curses readline
library, which makes nice single-line entry pads.