As Corion rightly pointed out, the code in my original post used WWW::Mechanize in a non-standard fashion (you'll notice I made note of this in the original post as well). When I wrote the code, I was working around a problem with the interface -- hopefully that problem has now been corrected.

I haven't touched this code in a while, but I might reassess to see if I can use it in a more polite manner. You should try using WWW::Mechanize the way it is described in its perldocs; it might just work. :^)