David:
I have had very mixed results with POST to various different web servers. I believe the problem is related to a web server's ability to handle Http 1.1 "chunked" messages.
In my application, I use POST to send data to and from our server, but since I can control both the sending and receiving side, we use DataInputStreams to encode the body of the message.
Have you tried using GET. If the query
string is not too long, it might work fine.
Nancy