TYPO3 Core

You can use t3lib_http_request for that. It uses HTTP_Request2 for this and just adds some TYPO3 defaults to it.
In addition the next version (4.7) will have a download method too.

$request = t3lib_div::make_instance('t3lib_http_request', $url, 'GET', array("connect_timeout" => $timeout));
$response = $request->send();
$content = $response->getBody();

Documentation is at:
http://wiki.typo3.org/T3lib_http_Request
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.http.http-request2.config.php

Yes it resolves the problem ;)

Thanks so far for your help