I've stripped my code down to this:

use Socket;
my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');
socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto) or die "socket: $!\n";
print "Good\n";
[download]

And that won't even work. I set FILES=200 and it was originally set to 150. Win32::Internet won't work because I can't use it at a socket level. The boxes do have TCP installed. Like I said, somehow Java can open up a socket and communicate. Of course, Java may be able to open sockets under Novell somehow. The machines are Windows 98. Also, rebooting will not help. Deep Freeze is installed, so you could wipe out the entire file system, install any program, delete registry keys and the machine we be the same as before after reboot. Maybe I'll write a small script that does a bunch of OPEN calls and see how many I can do there. Of course, the code does work on my box at home (98) and a laptop I borrowed (XP), so it must be something either with Novell or something else.