So, the bit that keeps repeating in the debugger is a red herring, I think. If you take a look at that section of the code, it repeats about 40 or 50 times - it looks like an infinite loop if you step through it in the debugger, but at run time certainly less than a second. Barring an extremely broken Perl, I don't see how that code could be looping infinitely. (It just builds indexes of common HTTP headers... and at module load-time, to boot.)

My wild guess is that the socket issue is closer to the heart of the problem. Is there perhaps a proxy issue? Can you telnet to port 80 from your terminal?