I understand the motive of trying to avoid editing the scripts, Devo, but in the long run if you stick with the previous author's plan, it's too fragile to maintain and impossible to safely extend.

tilly wrote a nice discussion of Pass by reference vs globals, in a thread of nice discussions that's relevant to the maintenance problem you are facing (thus the need of aspirin)

The true virtue of laziness is in saving everyone work. It is the most lazy thing, in this case, to edit out the costly, polluting mistakes in that code
mkmcconn