Can you get Net::SOCKS to run. You should be able to modify the code below to do a get from the SOCKS proxy. If you can get this to work, I don't think that it will be hard to make LWP work with it.

use Net::SOCKS;

my $sock = new Net::SOCKS(socks_addr => '192.168.1.3',
            socks_port => 1080,
            user_id => 'the_user',
            user_password => 'the_password',
            force_nonanonymous => 1,
            protocol_version => 5); 

# connect to http port and request /index.html
my $f= $sock->connect(peer_addr => '192.168.1.3', peer_port => 80);
print $f "GET /index.html\n";    # example writing to socket
while (<$f>) { print }     # example reading from socket
$sock->close();
[download]

See this example: http://mlawire.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-lwp-with-tor.html

libwww (the C library that LWP wraps) has some support for SOCKS proxies, but it seems that this functionality is not available from perl.

I can see two work arounds:

1) the difficult one: go hacking inside LWP and make the SOCKS support available in perl. Don't forget to submmit a patch to the maintainer ;-)

2) the no so difficult one: code an standalone HTTP proxy => SOCKS gateway. Maybe you can do it combining HTTP::Proxy and Net::SOCKS or IO::Socket::Socks.

You can also check LWP alternatives like curl or neon, both have perl wrappers, though I doubt they can support SOCKS either.

You can just open a local socket and have it connect to the SOCKS server. So you give LWP an address like http://localhost:8080/.
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Update: added code sample
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(after the update) I see, but this aproach is going to fail in all but the simplest cases: if the remote server runs several virtual servers, if it includes absolute URLs in some response or in redirects, etc.

What do you mean?

You need to talk using the SOCKS protocol with the SOCKS server, so you need a gateway between LWP (than can only talk to HTTP proxies) and the SOCKS server