I just thought I would post a final follow-up to this thread. Thanks to the advice of dave_the_m, I have this working splendidly and figure a snippet of code might help someone who wants a lightweight and simpla alternative to LWP for whatever reason (mine is that Smoothwall doesn't have it and I don't want to distribute it). Here is code that will work ($host, $port, $filename, $username, $password are all just plain strings passed in from somewhere else):

use IO::Socket::INET;
use MIME::Base64 ();

$pass64 = MIME::Base64::encode_base64("$username:$password", "");

my $sock;
unless ($sock = new IO::Socket::INET (PeerAddr => $host, PeerPort => $
+port, Proto => 'tcp', Timeout => 5)) {
    $errormessage = $tr{'could not connect to http://$host:$port/$file
+name'};
    return '0';
}

my $request = "";
my $eol = "\015\012";

$request = $request."GET /$filename HTTP/1.0".$eol;
$request = $request."User-Agent: Perl/5.8.0".$eol;
$request = $request."Host: $host:$port".$eol;
$request = $request."Accept: */*".$eol;
$request = $request."Connection: Keep-Alive".$eol;

if ($auth_required) {
    $request = $request."Authorization: Basic $pass64".$eol;
}

$request = $request."$eol";

$sock->print($request);

while (<$sock>) {
    printf $_;
}

close($sock);
[download]

Obviously, in that while loop, you will want to do something more useful with the data than print it to the console :) I put each line into an array element.