No go with the alternate install method, and also, I tried setting it up on another WordPress site we have which uses earlier version WordPress 3.2.1 and I get the same problem. This is what the CURL portion of our PHPinfo file looks like, CURL seems to be properly setup –
curl
cURL support enabled
cURL Information 7.24.0
Age 3
Features
AsynchDNS Yes
Debug No
GSS-Negotiate Yes
IDN No
IPv6 Yes
Largefile Yes
NTLM Yes
SPNEGO No
SSL Yes
SSPI Yes
krb4 No
libz Yes
CharConv No
Protocols dict, file, ftp, ftps, gopher, http, https, imap, imaps, ldap, pop3, pop3s, rtsp, scp, sftp, smtp, smtps, telnet, tftp
Host i386-pc-win32
SSL Version OpenSSL/0.9.8u
ZLib Version 1.2.5
libSSH Version libssh2/1.3.0