Wow, this is really stumping me. I only have two more things you can try:
- Add curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1); to each of the executions (should show all of cURL's output and such)
- Change the follow location option to true (1) like this for both of them: curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); That was one thing I just noticed, that should take care of the redirect problem
- If those don't help, I would try posting on a PHP dedicated forum such as http://www.phpdn.net. Although I am experienced with it, sometimes it just takes a fresh look :D
Let me know what you get.
EDIT: lol, went to grab something to eat in the middle of typing this and saw that you responded again, let me check what you've got out.
EDIT2: That is very strange, it is accessing the first page fine and not the second... at this point, I would go ahead and post on the forum I suggested, since they are dedicated to PHP. Obviously you can refer to this thread so that you don't have to retype everything. Very sorry I couldn't be much of a help, but let me know what you find, it might be useful to me in case I ever run into a difficult site.
Now that I think about it, you could just go chew out the web design team for making such a difficult website... lol.