SOAP-ERROR on localhost, Windows 7

I was having issues connecting to an external magento site's API via my local test server (apache, windows 7), kept getting the error:

SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'https://shop.address/api/?wsdl' : failed to load external entity "https://shop.address/api/?wsdl"

Turns out the problem was the https bit. Accessing the API via the non-secure http works fine. Obviously some bug there which I couldn't be bothered looking into at the moment.