Comment 1 for bug 992484

Please disregard this bug. I had some very old settings (older than 2002-03-12, which is as far as my current version control goes), that interfered and caused the wrong branch of a cond clause to be called:
(setq w3-user-fonts-take-precedence t ; Use _my_ font.
      w3-user-colors-take-precedence t ; Use _my_ colors.
      w3-honor-stylesheets nil ; No, just do it..
      w3-use-terminal-characters nil ; No weird characters.
      w3-use-terminal-characters-on-tty nil
      w3-horizontal-rule-char 45 ; I said: no weird characters
      w3-display-frames nil
      url-be-asynchronous t
      w3-do-incremental-display t
      url-honor-refresh-requests nil
      w3-delay-image-loads t)

I removed the url-be-asynchronous setting and then xml-rpc worked.