Thanks Mel, is there any other reason it would be reporting that curl is not running? I am the server admin and installed curl with ssl myself and have confirmed it is installed and enabled. I just checked the Joomla php info and confirmed as well, here is the report returned from that view (perhaps some other parameter here that may give you a clue why it is reporting as not available?).
curl
cURL support enabled
cURL Information 7.36.0
Age 3
Features
AsynchDNS Yes
CharConv No
Debug No
GSS-Negotiate Yes
IDN Yes
IPv6 Yes
krb4 No
Largefile Yes
libz Yes
NTLM Yes
NTLMWB Yes
SPNEGO No
SSL Yes
SSPI No
TLS-SRP No
Protocols dict, file, ftp, ftps, gopher, http, https, imap, imaps, ldap, ldaps, pop3, pop3s, rtsp, scp, sftp, smtp, smtps, telnet, tftp
Host x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
SSL Version OpenSSL/1.0.1e
ZLib Version 1.2.3
libSSH Version libssh2/1.4.3