I have no idea how to even answer your question! :) That said, I just installed Perl yesterday so I would be shocked if something was screwed up with it already. I am now suspecting something is wrong with my windows installation. If I change the opened file to a different directory (C:\public, for example) it works as expected. I am thinking that there is something about this specific directory tree. Fortunately, reinstalling Windows is painless and always error free. Ugh... Thanks for the help anyway!