so for those of you who may have been through this, beating your heads against the wall wondering what that "HTTP Request error is on your admin and update screens, here's some insight (i've been digging into this for hours, and so this explanation may only relate to typical web hosts - including my own, mediatemple, an otherwise great host)
remote file inclusion through php is the numero uno security issue for most hosting providers, and so in an effort to make this not possible they have all been shutting down the ability to put out requests via php for http calls (including out to drupal.org and so on)...as a result, this means you can't A) use the update status module, B) use OpenID and C) use aggregator module
but what's confounding is that you might set up your site and it might all work fine for a few days or weeks until a hosting admin sees the activity and flips the switch - then you'll see errors (that's what happened to me)...
in this case, don't worry, drupal is still just fine, as are all of the mods BUT you can not enable update status or aggregator or openID (or others that put out http requests through php) because they'll return errors and do note that you will now forever see an alert on your admin interface prompting you to enable update status even though you know that you can't...bummer.