You can analyze and analyze and guess, and add print statements and tweak and repeat this over and over and over again.

But at a certain point, we really really need to break out the debugger.

Get into the debugger, and trace it ALL the way down. Down into LWP, into the HTTPS networking code. You really need to just burrow down into the guts, looking at the contents of the variables as you go.

And go as deep as it takes to find the _exact_ place at which it fails.

Speculation and guessing can only go so far, before you need to break out the debugger. And it sounds like you are there.