You don't appear to have understood most of what I wrote as I wasn't dismissing the complaint and your reproduction steps had really nothing to do with what I was pointing out.

My point: lwp-request is choosing to use a different IP than your browsers are using when given the same host name. (I'm a little surprised that your browsers are so insistent on using the same IP, but that may just be a Windows thing.)

[ But the fact that only "/" is constantly failing (on that IP) was something that I only clued into after re-reading ikegami's reply (in part due to a large number of "oh, now it is working" replies here and via other media).

(Update: Ah, it appears that there are two different problems just on that one IP. One is "/" (the Monastery Gates) being blank (always, for everybody) and the other is lots of pages being blank only every so often (at least for some people -- perhaps based on the user's IP address). And this second probably should now be fixed, thanks to Corion. ) ]