The block of code in base.py that detects the presence of '://', canonicalizes the path, and preprends 'file://', should just all be removed. It serves no purpose. Just document that the path must be in URL form; that's the way suds works, for better or for worse. There's no point trying to hack around it. Also it pretty much breaks this module on windows.

This module does break on windows as-is, but I fixed it simply by adding another / to the prepended file:// (I only figured this out when I noticed my browser turned file:// into file:///).