I have an older version of Debian GNU/Linux and gpg 1.16 works fine
except when gpg 1.16 was compiled with an older version of the curl
library installed it uses instead curl-shim. The bug is that
the only keyserver I could connect to without errors was hkp://subkeys.pgp.net
and even then it often timed itself out. I upgraded the curl library
to a never version of curl and recompiled gpg 1.16 and the keyserver
worked as expected. There is something wrong with the simulated curl-shim.

This is also an issue with the command line version of gpg for windows
2.0.20 <Gpg4win 2.1.1>. unfortunatly I have no compilers for Windows XP
and I have to rely on downloaded binaries.