Ok. Interesting results on the Sniffer trace. It appears Mechanize is handling a redirect while LWP is not. Also the encapsulation of the POST on Mechanize is application/x-www-form-urlencoded while LWP just has variable: value in separate lines. So it appears Mechanize is doing much more work under the covers. I'll see how I can manipulate LWP to mimic Mechanize.