Net_URL problem with SOAP_WSDL

When attempting to set up a client to consume web services in my development environment, I ran in to problems with the SOAP_WSDL_Cache->get method -- after a pause of several seconds, it always returned a fault because of inability to retrieve the WSDL file. After some tracing, I found the culprit in the constructor of the Net_URL class (which is called by HTTP_Request - for no real apparent reason other than to perhaps justify the existence of Net_URL near as I can tell, but I digress). My dev environment happens to be running on port 8080, so the Net_URL class was setting the port of the WSDL file's URI to 8080 as well. The constructor tries to be overly smart (IMNSHO) and pulls the port number from $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_HOST'] irrespective of the url provided to the method. This is clearly not the right thing to do, as the host/port of the calling host should have zero bearing on the desired URI being created through Net_URL. If anything, the attempt to determine the port should use the incoming URL (if specified), or simply default to 80 (or, for the pedantic, default to nothing). Seems the offending code (which "figures out the port") should be removed from Net_URL. Finally, would it not be faster to use php's native ability to fopen a URL, or perhaps use curl? Why go through HTTP_Request at all? Al