Here is a patch to socketserver.py which can be applied to 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2. The fix is for BaseServer, ForkingMixIn and ThreadingMixIn. All three now correctly respond to the shutdown method. I have no way of testing Windows or MacOSX (based on docs, MacOSX should work without changes); the ForkingMixIn will raise an AssertionError on non-POSIX systems. There may be a better way of handling non-POSIX systems, but again, I'm not able to test or develop at this time. I'll also update the simpletest.py script.