I started trying to write a stand-alone program that would repeat this problem but so far I've failed. This is what I have right now:

https://gist.github.com/bagder/dd7a56d2bb76d99a12a6

it feels likely that this problem is due to a specific option or a specific code flow...

I'll appreciate all the help I can get in getting a reproducible test case

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** [bugs:#1426]  curl v7.38.0 does not work with xbmc - cannot scrape or download**
**Status:** open
**Created:** Sat Sep 20, 2014 12:01 PM UTC by graysky
**Last Updated:** Mon Sep 22, 2014 10:48 AM UTC
**Owner:** Daniel Stenberg
Xbmc v13.2 does not work properly with curl v7.38.0. I cannot scrape anything now nor download anything through xbmc. The log indicates timing out to curl. I rebuilt xbmc against this new version of curl, but still, no downloads are possible.  Downgrading to v7.37.1 of curl solves the problem, so it seems to be related to this new release.
I have verified that I can download files form the shell with the current version of curl.  The xbmc dev group closed my ticket against xbmc with the comment, "report to curl."
Here are the lines from xbmc's log file showing the timeout:
ERROR:CCurlFile::FillBuffer-Failed:Timeoutwasreached(28)
ERROR:CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect,didn'tgetanydatafromstream.
ERROR:Open-failedtoopensource<http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/gotham/addons.xml.md5>
ERROR:CCurlFile::FillBuffer-Failed:Timeoutwasreached(28)
ERROR:CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect,didn'tgetanydatafromstream.
ERROR:Open-failedtoopensource<http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/frodo/addons.xml.md5>
ERROR:CCurlFile::FillBuffer-Failed:Timeoutwasreached(28)
ERROR:CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect,didn'tgetanydatafromstream.
ERROR:Open-failedtoopensource<http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/gotham/addons.xml|Encoding=gzip>
ERROR:CCurlFile::FillBuffer-Failed:Timeoutwasreached(28)
ERROR:CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect,didn'tgetanydatafromstream.
ERROR:Open-failedtoopensource<http://mirrors.xbmc.org/addons/frodo/addons.xml|Encoding=gzip>
ERROR:RepositoryXBMC.orgAdd-onsreturnednoadd-ons,listingmayhavefailed
OS: Arch Linux x86_64
% curl -V
curl 7.38.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.38.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1i zlib/1.2.8 libssh2/1.4.3
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smtp smtps telnet tftp 
Features: AsynchDNS IPv6 Largefile GSS-API SPNEGO NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz TLS-SRP 
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