Alas, because I never have them set, so *any* values there would have represented a change. Sorry, in retrospect I didn't clearly state that I don't use any proxy here. So, zero keys meant to me that no proxy changes had bee instituted on my machine.
Comment on Re^4: Why would LWP::Simple::get stop working?
The problem can nonetheless be found in the differences between LWP::Simple's _trivial_http_get and LWP::UserAgent. You'll probably discover something user if you print the URLs being requested and the status code in which they result..