The UserAgent value is utterly irrelevant to the encoding problem you are experiencing with XML::LibXML.

Indeed, we established that, however, I need to send the UserAgent in this case, in order to get the content I need, because the site switches on it.

Initially, I didn't see that commenting it out returned a VB error upstream on their end, inside the content, thus delivering me content, but the WRONG content, when the "proper" UserAgent isn't sent in the request. This is why I originally attributed it to a UserAgent error. That is no longer the case. It is an error of encodings, as we have now fleshed out.

In response to your question.. I had version 1.94 of Encode, and just upgraded it to 1.95, with the same results. I'm was also using 2.003 of LWP::UserAgent and 1.53 of XML::LibXML (which I just upgraded to 1.54 from Phish's directory; CPAN didn't seem to notice the newer version). After upgrading, the failures are still the same.

Are you on Windows? Or a POSIX system? It fails here on 3 Linux systems and 1 FreeBSD 4.8 system, all clean installs.