Can't connect to WSDL via https on PHP 5.5

Hi!

I have written a small php library for some SOAP functions in a wsdl 
file and it works perfectly with PHP 5.4.16.
However, with version 5.5 the connection won't work, I get the following 
error:

SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 
'https://<myServer>/query.jws?WSDL' : failed to load external entity 
"https://<myserver>/query.jws?WSDL"

My old code looks like this:

$this->soap = new SoapClient($this->getAPIURL(QUERY));
return $this->sendSOAP('hello', $params);

and, as already said it works perfectly fine on PHP 5.4.

Now I found that on version 5.5 there is a new option "ssl_method". It 
looks like it has no effect whatsoever, because the result is always the 
same, regardless which option I put. Also the default value is the same 
as in PHP 5.4.
However, I changed my code to this but without success:

try
{
   $this->soap = new SoapClient($this->getAPIURL(QUERY),
     array (
       "ssl_method" => "SOAP_SSL_METHOD_SSLv23"
     )
   );
}
catch (SoapFault $f)
{
   print $f->faultstring;
}

I am using php 5.5.6 via XAMPP on my Windows machine.
Does anyone have any idea what I might do wrong? Or could it be a bug in 
the newest PHP version?

Thanks and best regards
Tobias