I've also attached a potential patch for the C module Modules/socketmodule.c inside internal_connect(). A few notes: This seems to work both without time-out and with time-out sockets (non-blocking). One concern would be a signal storm prolonging the operation beyond the time-out. Should we keep track of the actual time taken in this loop and check it against the 'timeout' parameter ? Also, I don't think we can call PyErr_CheckSignals() in this context. Does this need to happen at all ?