Lightweight tool for viewing raw HTTP messages?

I'm investigating differences in behaviour between a couple of Web servers. I need to see raw response data from the servers (i.e. before the response is de-chunked if it has "Transfer-Encoding:chunked" and before it is decompressed if it has "Content-Encoding:gzip").

I can find plenty of simple HTTP client that nearly do what I need (e.g. Poster, RESTClient), but they tend to decode the response one step too far.

Network analysers like Wireshark give me what I need but are a bit heavyweight. Telnet is my best bet so far, but is a bit too simplistic (actions like capturing data or entering requests are a bit laborious).

Can anyone recommend a good, lightweight tool for sending / viewing the raw data that constitute HTTP messages?

Edit: I should add that I'm on Windows. Also, the tool would need to work both with remote and local servers.

Fiddler is an "HTTP debugging proxy". It allows you to inspect HTTP messages, and also compose new HTTP messages. Each message can be viewed in multiple ways, such as raw text, and in a hex editor. A possible downside is that it requires the .NET Framework.

i vote for curl

$ curl -I http://www.amazon.com
HTTP/1.1 405 MethodNotAllowed
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:21:45 GMT
Server: Server
Set-Cookie: skin=noskin; path=/; domain=.amazon.com; expires=Tue, 16-Mar-2010 01:21:45 GMT
x-amz-id-1: 02Q7DN8FGW708892524E
allow: POST, GET
x-amz-id-2: POduQxVVwgUXSZRQEM5nWw+9DDvV22s7
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1