Hmm... I did all my investigation on LWP::UserAgent version 2.1 which comes with 5.6.1. Perhaps it's all wrong for the version that comes with 5.8.0. But from looking through the docs, you can get LWP to use http10.pm by setting the PERL_LWP_USE_HTTP_10 environment variable to something TRUE. Perhaps try that, and see if it solves your problem...