I tried using the ssl module in Python 2.6 but I was told that it wasn't available. After installing OpenSSL, I recompiled 2.6 but the problem persists.
Any suggestions?
Did you install the OpenSSL development libraries?  I had to install openssl-devel on CentOS, for example.  On Ubuntu, sudo apt-get build-dep python2.5 did the trick (even for Python 2.6).
Adding SSL support to Python 2.6