Problem with urllib2.urlopen() opening a local file

[deja user]

I want to use urlopen() to open either a http://... file or a local
file File:C:/...  I don't have problems opening and reading the file
either way.  But when I run the script on a server (ArcGIS server),
the request won't complete if it was trying to open a local file.
Even though I call close() in either case, something seemed to be
preventing the script to complete if urlopen is trying to open a local
file.  I wonder if there is anything else I should do in the code to
kill the file descriptor, or if it is a known issue that something is
leaking

When running the script standalone, this is not an issue.