OK, this is better ; http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/13.html#ultraliberal_rss_parser Works quite happily in win2K environment. Perhaps rather too liberal, but I guess we are dealing with html in another guise :-) plus http://www.timo-tasi.org/python/timeoutsocket.py needed. Tks for the input. regards DaveP