Don't feel bad. People stumble into this one all of the time.

What you're probably running into is this: your browser knows what about your firewall/proxy server, but Perl scripts (include PPM) do not.

The (poorly documented) trick is to set the environment variable HTTP_PROXY to point to your proxy server. E.g.,     HTTP_PROXY=http://stupidfirewall.mycompany.com:8080/ LWP (LWP::UserAgent:env_proxy() in specific) will detect this setting, and use it when making HTTP requests.