Your right, I did mis-read. I took

2) I don't skip to the 'next' server

To mean that you were hanging at that point. Sorry, my mistake.

Thinking about this further, I have, what is no more than a speculation, that the new() call doesn't actually establish communications with the remote server, but simply readies the object for that communication. If this is true, then the way to determine if the server is actually there would be to check the return code from one of the calls that would force it to actually attempt the communication. Eg.

 $handle->GetOldest($base)
        or die "Can't get number of oldest EventLog record\n";
[download]

Like I say, this is speculation, but worth a try.

I agree with your speculation. I've looked back over some event log parsing and harvesting that I did last year, and it appears that even the  GetOldest(\$base) won't necessarily give a "good" error, but  GetNumber(\$count) will.

Thanks chief. Between the two of you, I'm cured.
I feel as if I didn't take the simple mental step and solve this myself, so I will probably cut off a toe later tonight... but then it's been head-chopping chaos at work lately, and my department has been reduced to its size from 4 years ago as of this week. Yarg. Anyway.. done venting a little.. thanks a ton =)
-=rev=-