Ah...that'd explain it :) The PPM didn't include the readme, so I missed that bit. I'm not sure how one is supposed to turn a scalarref into a hashref though simply by deriving a new class... if '$class->SUPER::new()' returns a scalarref, then you're stuck with that as the 'base' of the derived class, surely? (...and I *have* tried, btw, with evey single bl**din' combination of re-re-blessing multiple-inherited refs to derived hashes-of-hashrefs that I can think of...{g} )

Thanks,
Ben