Questions about the code

[Varbin]

While reading the code i stumbled across some strange things in the code:

• Why is Threading.Thread a parent of every class? No multithreading capabilities are ever used. I was able to safely remove this.
• Why is every attribute of the ShellDetector "private"? As python doesn't really support the concept of public/private attributes I find this strange and as far I know this isn't common practise. Generally: Why does nearly any variable name in a method start with an underscore?
• Why regex is used for matching? Wouldn't Python's in operator be more readable (it's faster, too! source) The same is for every other string operation - instead of regex, Python's string methods would fit better.