ftplib: Software caused connection abort, how I solved it

[Mad Sweeney]

My program polls FTP servers at intervals for jobs to process.
Its running as a service on Windows server 2000 or 2003 :-(.
About 13% of times the retrbinary and less often the nlst calls would fail 
with
"Software caused connection abort".
I could find no relevant solution on the intertubes.
I added blocksize=2048 to the retrbinary call which lowerd the failures to 
about 2% but that was still unsatisfactory for me.
When I added:
  socket.setdefaulttimeout(60)
to the setup stuff in order to solve a different problem, the connection 
abort errors went away completely.
Even when I restored retrbinary to use the default blocksize it still 
worked.

HTH