Working through my college network...
 

Okay

Heres an odd one for me.

I am on a College network, OW works if I specify the proxies.
If I set my Network location to Automatic it doesn't.
Neither does Safari or HTML files in Path Finder (which can do a kind of pass through if files are in a frameset)

BUT... it works fine in Firefox.

Is there some Gecko/Webkit wackiness that is doing this?

I ask because my Mail only works if I am on automatic, I've banged my head against this one a while now.

I'm no networking pref pane expert so if some can correct me, go for it. But if you set your configuration to be automatic, don't you still need to specify your proxy settings somewhere?

Firefox has it's own proxy settings and thus doesn't use what you have set in the system preferences.