Well....

Thanks for the response. I ended up getting access to another box on the client's LAN (with perl 5.8.6 and LWP 5.8) and opened a network connection to mySQL for the parts of the code that needed it but weren't included in the initial post. It runs just fine that way and the client is happy. I'm pretty convinced that the problem was an incompatibility between www:mech's handling of https authentication and ActiveState 5.8.0 with LWP 5.68. I'll run it with LWP::Debug and post a more educated opinion once I figure out exactly what was wrong. I had been working with LWP::Debug earlier, when I was trying to jump through amazon's hoops with LWP, but stopped when I switched to www::mech and things seemed to be working. God knows, I looked all over the net for an explanation or someone else who had this problem and never found it. But for now, I'm just happy that I can send this invoice!