Drupal 7 SSL connection issue with sockets; so force usage of curl if available.

socketfix.php

/**
 * Wrapper to leverage curl when possible to avoid potential socket connection
 * issues with certain SSL connections
 */
function _cis_connector_make_request($url, $options){
  // support developers overloading the request method, specifically curl
  // as some systems can have issues with SSL configuration and socket connections
  if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
    $headers = array();
    foreach ($options['headers'] as $property => $value) {
      $headers[] = $property . ': ' . $value;
    }
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
      CURLOPT_URL => $url,
      CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
      CURLOPT_HEADER => TRUE,
      CURLOPT_VERBOSE => TRUE,
      CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
      CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
      CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
      CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
      CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => strtoupper($options['method']),
      CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $headers,
      CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => "",
    ));
    $return = curl_exec($curl);
    $header_size = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
    $header = substr($return, 0, $header_size);
    $rawheader = explode("\n", $header);
    $body = substr($return, $header_size);
    curl_close($curl);
    $response = new stdClass();
    $response->data = $body;
    foreach ($rawheader as $header) {
      if (strpos($header, 'Link: ') === 0) {
        $response->headers['link'] = str_replace('Link: ', '', $header);
      }
    }
  }
  // support for httprl which is faster then core and does same thing
  elseif (module_exists('httprl')) {
    httprl_request($url, $options);
    // send the request off
    $tmp = httprl_send_request();
    $response = array_pop($tmp);
  }
  else {
    // original fallback
    $response = drupal_http_request($url, $options);
  }
  return $response;
}