HttpWebRequest method fails against Ravenous web server

[Alaskaman]

I am attempting to retrieve the response stream from a Ravenous web server (http://ostatic.com/ravenous) without success. I consistenly get the following error:

System.Net.WebException: The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine

The code I am using is as follows:

Function WRequest(URL As String, method As String, POSTdata As String) As String
  Dim responseData As String = ""
  Try
    Dim hwrequest As Net.HttpWebRequest = Net.Webrequest.Create(URL)
    hwrequest.Accept = "*/*"
    hwrequest.AllowAutoRedirect = True
    hwrequest.UserAgent = "http_requester/0.1"
    hwrequest.Timeout = 60000
    hwrequest.Method = method
 
    If hwrequest.Method = "POST" Then
      hwrequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
      Dim encoding As New System.Text.ASCIIEncoding() 'Use UTF8Encoding for XML requests
      Dim postByteArray() As Byte = encoding.GetBytes(POSTdata)
      hwrequest.ContentLength = postByteArray.Length
      Dim postStream As IO.Stream = hwrequest.GetRequestStream()
      postStream.Write(postByteArray, 0, postByteArray.Length)
      postStream.Close()
    End If
 
    Dim hwresponse As Net.HttpWebResponse = hwrequest.GetResponse()
 
    If hwresponse.StatusCode = Net.HttpStatusCode.OK Then
      Dim responseStream As IO.StreamReader = New IO.StreamReader(hwresponse.GetResponseStream())
      responseData = responseStream.ReadToEnd()
    End If
 
    hwresponse.Close()
  Catch e As Exception
    responseData = "An error occurred: " & e.Message
  End Try
 
  Return responseData
End Function

This code works fine for requests against Yahoo.com, Google.com and other websites I have tried but any request against a Ravenous web server fails with the above error.

I have tried modifying the app.config like so:

<httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing = "true"/>

with no joy.

I have searched and searched the web for answers, trying all different types of code and app.config modifications without success. Does anyone have any experience with a Ravenous web server?