one month latter and nobody cared. so closing ...
Thank you for the report. There are currently some other curl's bugs with higher priority and/or severity but I am going to perform the update soon.
The problem is the broken NSS support. All the new curls fail to deal with fedora certificates and cause random errors. We would terribly break the fedora infrastructure if we update curl to anything more recent than 7.18.2. Try to upload a new tarball with anything later than 7.18.2 for instance. For a successful upgrade we need to polish all curl, nss and nspr to work well together. They don't currently.
fixed and built as curl-7.19.3-1.fc11