last evening, i was finally able to find a program that allowed me to monitor the TCP flow on my localhost (between my web browser and this Perl proxy program). Wireshark can not do this, but an app called RawCap can. I saved the *.pcap log file, opened it in Wireshark and applied the proper filter 'tcp.port eq 8888' and it revealed the stream. I saw a properly formatted HTTP redirect was in fact sent - so that then lead me down the same path you came up with. i started to search to see what most browsers would do in this situation. i found the exact same document that you referenced, and read that indeed no normally available browsers will make a request to a local file in response to a redirect. so yes, another approach will need to be taken. Either my Perl proxy program will need to directly send the file using HTTP, or i can install a local web browser and simply redirect to my local web server's html folder.

thanks for your help - as this was driving me batty. now i know the direction i need to take!