First of all, you can aslo make custom POST requests with LWP::UserAgent by using the $ua->post() call, which will also take parameters as arguments. - I would probably go for that option.

Second, them HTML::Form documentation is not very clear on exactly what should be passed to HTML::Form->parse(), but a little browsing in the source gives me this working code:

open HTML,"<./index.html" or die $!;
my @forms = HTML::Form->parse(*HTML,'http://localhost/');
close HTML;
[download]

Where the first argument to parse() is the typeglob that contains the filehandle of the HTML file, and the second argument is the base url, which is needed to resolve relative urls in the form.

Hope this helps :-)

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
[download]