urllib and sites that require passwds

[bob_smith_17280 at hotmail.com]

Hello,

I'm doing a small website survey as a consultant for a company that has
a large private lan. Basically, I'm trying to determine how many web
sites there are on their network and what content the sites contain
(scary how they don't know this, but I suspect many companies are this
way).

Everything is going fine so far except for sites that require passwds
to be accessed. I don't want to view content on these sites, I only
want to note that they are passwd protected, make a list of them and
move on. The problem is that urllib hangs waiting for a username/passwd
to be entered. Is there a graceful way to deal with this?
Many thanks,
Bob