SOAP::Lite was originally written with the expectation that _everything_ was rpc/encoded. I personally prefer document/literal or document/literal wrapped, myself, but it's a function of exactly what you're trying to do -- see What WSDL should I use? for more info.

As to how to downgrade SOAP::Lite -- it's actually fairly easy -- you can either go to search.cpan.org, search for the package, then select from the little version pulldown to get an older version ... or, if you actually want to install through CPAN (and who doesn't, as you don't have to manually process the requirements), you just need to figure out the right package name:

cpan> i /SOAP-Lite/
Distribution    B/BR/BRYCE/SOAP-Lite-Utility-0.01.tar.gz
Distribution    B/BY/BYRNE/SOAP/SOAP-Lite-0.60a.tar.gz
Distribution    B/BY/BYRNE/SOAP/SOAP-Lite-0.67.tar.gz
Distribution    D/DY/DYACOB/SOAP-Lite-ActiveWorks-0.10.tar.gz
Distribution    D/DY/DYACOB/SOAP-Lite-SmartProxy-0.11.tar.gz
Distribution    L/LL/LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.4.tar.gz
Distribution    L/LL/LLAP/SOAP-Lite-Simple-1.7.tar.gz
Distribution    M/MW/MWS/ResourcePool-Resource-SOAP-Lite-1.0101.tar.gz
Distribution    S/SM/SMEISNER/SOAP-Lite-InstanceExporter-0.02.tar.gz
9 items found

cpan> install B/BY/BYRNE/SOAP/SOAP-Lite-0.60a.tar.gz

...
[download]

Note that I searched for 'SOAP-Lite' and not 'SOAP::Lite', so I got the names of tarballs.

Update: it would've helped if I made a point about the SOAP encoding types -- SOAP::Lite can talk to non-RPC services, but it was designed in from the beginning ... they've been adding better handling for all of the edge cases, but because it now does special processing, it might accidentally break something ... if you continue to have problems, you might try the soaplite mailing list

Update 2: okay, it wouldn't helped if I had bothered to read yesterday's soaplite messages, as it seems the question was asked there, too.