Cannot pass Windows paths.  urlparse will find a scheme and interpret as a URL

>>> import urlparse
>>> path = "C:\Users\careyh\VT-scanner\tmpavg8j8\batch-0-IDE-8.5.3-83203.zip"
>>> urlparse.urlparse(path)
ParseResult(scheme='c', netloc='', path='\\Users\\careyh\\VT-scanner\tmpavg8j8\x
08atch-0-IDE-8.5.3-83203.zip', params='', query='', fragment='')
>>> url = "http://bugs.activestate.com/"
>>> urlparse.urlparse(url)
ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='bugs.activestate.com', path='/', params='', q
uery='', fragment='')
>>>

Based on that, switching to netloc seemed safe.  Checked on Ubuntu 13.10:

>>> import urlparse
>>> import os
>>> urlparse.urlparse(os.getcwd())
ParseResult(scheme='', netloc='', path='/home/qatest/virustotal', params='', query='', fragment='')