I have a very strange problem with a large cgi program that I'm developing on a windows machine with ActiveState perl. I have a hash loaded with the values of the browser's cookie so that the many modules that make up the cgi program can easily access the user's state. When the user turns off cookies in the browser, this hash still exists, it just contains no keys.

It works just great when the user sends a cookie to the server, but something breaks when no cookies are sent. When I use this hash in a boolean test ( ie. $hash{key}>3 ) the process hangs with no error output. It just sits there doing nothing and taking up no cpu cycles. When I move this program to a linux server with the same version on perl it works just great whether or not the user has cookies on. I'm hopeing this is a bug in the windows port of perl, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

PS: Sorry that I can't post any code, but it's too large and really wouldn't help much anyway.