In case anyone ever finds this looking for answers, did three things to get it working:

1. I installed IO::Socket::SSL to a version greater than 1.90 (in fact version 2.012). (I just copied the source of that module to a file in a directory on the server.)
2. I had to do the same with IO::Socket::SSL::PublicSuffix.
3. I used a use lib qw( /path/to/module ) statement to get my program to load the right modules.

I did not find it necessary to upgrade LWP. And I did have a version of OpenSSL installed that was greater than 0.9.8o. Cheers,

Brent