General :: Wget Works But Elinks Won't Go Online?

I've got a bit of tricky situation with a Red Hat box, our network uses a proxy server to connect to the internet. I've exported its address using "export http_proxy=http://usernameassword@server_iport" and to test I ran a wget against www.google.co.za and got a response, but using elinks to connect to google gives a proxy requires authentication error. It cant possibly be the credentials as wget can connect. I've confirmed that the proxy was exported by running "env | grep -i proxy", I also tried appending that line on both "/etc/profile" and/or "/root/.bash_profile" with no luck. one other thing I noticed is that passing those arguments directly to elinks works, not only this but "ssh -X server_ip_address" then running firefox& and giving it the proxy address also works. Is the any other way to make this line global, meaning to tell all applications that require internet connection to use the proxy? The server is sitting at a remote location and I only have access to a shell.