Socket access to low numbered ports?

[John Burton]

I wrote a python program on windows which needs to listen for
connections on a low numbered port which works fine on windows but on
linux you need to be *root* in order to listen for connections on port
numbers below 1024.

I really don't want to run my program as root because that would give it
unnecessary access to the whole of the system.

Has anyone got any suggestion on the best way to allow my program to
listen on those socket without runing as root when doing anything else?
Ideally I want this to be portable so the same program still runs on
windows.