As at least two of you pointed out, I could reproduce the error easily by useing either LWP::Protocol::https or Net::SSLeay .

I owe you all an apology. I've lurked here long enough to know how much care you put into your responses, and yet I neglected to mention that my scripts are running under IIS. While I could reproduce the error by using either of the above mentioned modules, they both load fine from the command line.

This is resolved. With your suggestions I realized that my command line and IIS $ENV{path} values didn't match. Reason being the machine is already in production so I didn't want to restart IIS, and Strawberry Perl was installed after IIS was started, so IIS and the Perl processes that it spawned had a few paths missing.

Thanks everyone.