I ran into similar issues and can repeat your results. Are you on a SPARC? I posted a bug report on this on sourceforge a year ago. This started happening for me over a year ago after an upgrade. I've upgraded several times but no luck. Currently use v1.34

Here's a work around. Prepend a space to the Url. It won't use _trivial_get that way. (Don't ask me why I thought to try this, Zen I guess.)

# This don't work for me.
perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'my $a=get("http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_min
+or.html?FRONTID=SCIENCE"); print $a;'

#This does
perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'my $a=get(" http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_mi
+nor.html?FRONTID=SCIENCE"); print $a;'
[download]

This drove me nuts for quite some time. Never was able to understand why it happens. Only with get, not getstore or getprint.

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."