What kind of problems exactly does get-http.arc give you? It's a translation of a piece of Common Lisp code I had written to be able to fetch RSS feeds. The CL version worked well for the task.
In my CL project I thought to parse it manually, but I've abandoned the project after finishing the HTTP part. I've never tried using it, but you could have a look at treeparse in Anarki, if you haven't done already.