Today I pushed a completely new socket implementation, which is much closer to p5's IO::Socket::INET, and IMHO has a much saner interface.
For a client, write my $c = IO::Socket::INET.new(:host('http://rakudo.org/'), :port(80)); # no separate .open call necessary. For a server, write my $s = IO::Socket::INET.new( :localhost('127.0.0.1'), :localport(1024), :listen ); # no separate calls to .bind or .listen necessary. I hope this also addresses your problem. I've just pushed a patch for LWP::Simple that adopts this new socket usage, and passes all tests. Cheers, Moritz