Here was the problem...

I needed to create an HTTP::Response object explicitly and assign it a return code, content, and header information.

#new response object with default error values
my $response = new HTTP::Response( 404,undef,undef,"404 - Not found." 
+);
#assign values using obvious methods
$response->header(Content_Length => $len);
$response->header(Content_Type => "image/svg+xml");
$response->content($out);
$response->code(200);
$c->send_response($response);
[download]

This works now.

Thanks you all for the help.

hackmare.