Webrequest to server that returns a string

[KSC]

Hello,

I am trying to access an ethernet temperature probe in my app.
The probe is properly configured. Using IE I can access the data using the
IPaddress & "/temp". This returns a string containing data from a number of
temperature probes attached to the hub.
For example:
input "http://192.168.1.110/temp"
returns "Probe 1|75.5|Probe 2|78.9|Probe 3|-99.9|Probe 4|-99.9"

In my app, I am using a WebRequest as in the documentation:

Public Function TemperatureData(ByVal url As String) As String
Try
Dim wReq As WebRequest = WebRequest.Create(url)
Dim wRes As HttpWebResponse = DirectCast(wReq.GetResponse,
HttpWebResponse)
Dim sr As New StreamReader(wRes.GetResponseStream)

return sr.ReadToEnd

Catch Exc As Exception
msgbox(exc.tostring)
End Try
End Function

When I pass the URL as in the example above, I get the following error:
System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected
error occurred on a receive.

When I pass the URL without "/temp", the function returns the HTML code for
the probe's default page as expected.

Why does this code successfully return the html page, but not the string data?

Thanks in advance for any help!