weird PEAR wget update problem: possibly iptables?

[aproximation]

Hello, I am trying to get the newest PEAR for my PHP installed on my Fedora Core 3 machine using the go-pear.org site. I got a member of the PEAR developers to help me but we came across a strange problem.

I can wget http://pear.php.net/ just fine but if I try wget http://pear.php.net/get/pear-stable I get no response from wget!

I naturaly tried a tcpdump so I could see what was happening at the IP level but I am still confused. Both wgets have similar WIN and ACK (first two lines from tcpdump - myIPortX > pearIP:http then pearIP:http > myIPortX) responses with the exception that the wget http://pear.php.net follows its WIN, ACK packets with content where as a connection just can't seem to be made with the wget http://pear.php.net/get/pear-stable.

Can someone please help me? I am running out of people to ask.
Thank you!
-wade

[aproximation]

Another test I ran was to mimic all of the http headers that my web browser at home was sending (because my web browser at home - Firefox on WinXP - downloads PEAR-1.4.9.tgz from http://pear.php.net/get/pear-stable). So I ran:

wget --header="ACCEPT: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5" --header="ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en-us,en;q=0.5" --header="ACCEPT_CHARSET: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7" --header="ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip,deflate" --header="KEEP_ALIVE: 300" --header="CONNECTION: keep-alive" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Fedora Core 3; Linux; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2" http://pear.php.net/get/pear-stable

But that didn't work either...

[aproximation]

I also tried to telnet pear.php.net 80.
When I connected and ran GET / I got the index.html, but GET /get/pear-stable just hung. Interestingly GET /get/ returned "no package selected" and terminated the connection, so something is going on...