>Now the problem: I always receive an OK 200 connect but get an internal server error message from the web site, UNLESS I have opened a browser and previously gone to the SAME exact URL with the SAME exact string. Once I have done that, I could close the browser and my code works fine. But since there are about 1000 lookups a day, that is not a great plan <s>.
>
>XMLHttp is supposed to work with the machines WINET stack and use the same HTTP call as a browser, but something is off here.
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>What am I missing?
>

A lot of sites require a cookie to be set first. You can usually make this happen just by getting the main page from the site. So at the top of the code, get that page (and ignore it), then do the rest of your processing.