Again - Thankyou for taking the time to reply.

I have and continue to reference the info found from "perldoc lwpcook" which I belive you suggest looking at. However I have had little success on the subject of authentication. The documentation being perhaps a little too brief for a novice such as myself. It was the use of the phrase "should be able" that prompted me to suspect more info might be available and 'out there'.

Also the perldoc entry for LWP whilst referencing the use of the environmental variable HTTP_Proxy does not mention the _User and _Pass environmental variables. Still until your post I didn't realise LWP had it's own separate perldoc info and having read it it references some more things that I shall now proceed to check out.