Mike,
I'm not a security expert, but in this older post there was a rather similar problem.
Could it be that your web switch also uses digest authentication instead of basic authentication? Both methods require a username and password. But the request library uses basic authentication, unless it is specified explicit that digest authentication is required.
If you update to the latest Node-RED version, then your http-request node will support Digest Authentication:
Would be nice if you could test whether that solves the problem!
