I agree that this is an annoying bug, and I'm glad that it doesn't occur in the 27-maint branch. I won't close this issue yet though, I'd prefer to add a unittest that demonstrates the problem in 2.7.0 and shows that the problem is fixed afterwords. Basically something like this: pid = os.fork() if pid == 0: # child import platform import urllib urllib.get_proxies() os._exit(0) else: # parent exit = sys.waitpid(pid, 0) self.assertEquals(exit, 0)