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Alright, what happens is the following:
- the file you're trying to retrieve is actually redirected, so the server send a HTTP/1.X 302 Moved Temporarily
- in urllib, when we get a redirection, we call redirect_internal:
 def redirect_internal(self, url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers, data):
 if 'location' in headers:
 newurl = headers['location']
 elif 'uri' in headers:
 newurl = headers['uri']
 else:
 return
 void = fp.read()
 fp.close()
 # In case the server sent a relative URL, join with original:
 newurl = basejoin(self.type + ":" + url, newurl)
 return self.open(newurl)
the fp.read() is there to wait for the remote end to close connection
The problem, in this case, is that with Python 3.1, httplib uses HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/1.0 in version 2.6, and with HTTP/1.1 the server doesn't close the connection after sending the redirect (shown by tcpdump).
So, the process remains stuck on fp.read().
Now, in version 3.1, if we simply change Lib/http/client.py:628
from 
class HTTPConnection:
 _http_vsn = 11
 _http_vsn_str = 'HTTP/1.1'
to
class HTTPConnection:
 _http_vsn = 11
 _http_vsn_str = 'HTTP/1.0'
to use HTTP/1.0 instead, the retrieval works fine.
Obviously, this is not a good solution. Since the RFC doesn't seem to require the server to close the connection after sending a redirect, we'd probably better close the connection ourselves.
That's what the attached patch does, it simply removes the call to fp.read() before closing the connection. It also removes this for http_error_default, since if an error occurs, we probably want to close the connection as soon as possible instead of waiting for server to do so.