Well, my first post on perlmonks.org...
( and I FSK it up.... sheesh! )

I am working from behind a corporate firewall, so I tried the LWP example above with my proxy info, and am getting:

Protocol scheme: 'http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.xml' is not supported.
along with what looks like a 501 response in the debugger.

I tried this with a couple of different URLs and got the same result, so I suspect it may be the proxy setup. Any ideas?

Just to confirm:

My proxy settings in Netscape show

pset.tgw.canon.co.jp/proxy.pac

so I used:
#set up your proxy here
$ua->proxy('http', 'http://pset.tgw.canon.co.jp:80');

I tried both 80 and 8080 for ports, with the same result.

Any advice appreciated.