[Python] Why does calling curl solve my SSL issues in Python on Windows

This is a pretty bizarre issue. I have created a fresh Windows 11 VM using VMware Fusion on Mac. I installed VMware Tools and Python on it

winget install -e --id Python.Python.3.11


I start python from the Powershell terminal and try to connect to Google for testing:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.google.com").status


The result is an error:

urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1006)>


Now I figured out that to fix the error I need to exit python and type into the terminal

curl https://www.google.com


This will generate for a very short moment a message in the terminal:



Afterwards my SSL issues are resolved forever. The code above will happily return the expected HTTP status code 200

>>> urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.google.com").status
200


So why is that? Why does calling curl fix my SSL issues in Python on Windows?

PS. Actually I found another answer on stackoverflow, which suggested to call curl to fix network issues: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78372621/179014 . But no explanation is given, why that works.

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