I realize that the script will take a while to run and that's why I added the print STDERR statement. Thinking the problem was that maybe those statements weren't printing immediately, I set $|=1. It doesn't seem to be helping. I'm rerunning the code and it's stuck again, this time at the second iteration.

Anyway, thanks for your help. I'm now using LWP::Simple::getstore to save the files locally. I hope that by running the script against local files, I'll be able to bypass whatever's holding up the get calls.