The issue I had with a particular joomla site is that I could not load external RSS feeds.   The error was “Could not connect to {server}”.   RSS Feed load failed.   This was caused in the SimplePie.php class around line 6601.

Steps to resolve:

I enabled the cUrl extension in php.ini (running on a IIS platform)

Changed the code around line 6536:

curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXY, $ip);
curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, $port);
curl_setopt($fp, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, $login . ‘:’ . $passwd);

where $ip is the proxy IP Address, $port is the port and $login:$password is the proxy authentication.

After this, I can load in external RSS feeds! YAY

References:

http://www.phpdig.net/ref/rn11re189.html