Well, I am sorry that I couldn't be of more help.
I am just flabbergasted as to how this code not only fails to get the web page $content on your machine, but winds up with a null string for $content instead of an undef value.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
$|=1;   #turn off buffering so we see all the lines

print "starting...get...\n";

my $content = get("http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=957704");
   die "blank content" unless defined $content;

print "ending...get...\n";
print $content;
print "END of CONTENT\n";
[download]

The above code runs on my machine. This is bizarre.

I guess now we come down to the very improbable...how did you install LWP::Simple on your Windows machine?