You gotta be super careful when you place a module in a script or in the same file as another module. It's very easy to execute code in the wrong order. And this is what happened here.

Unfortunately, it's not an 'order' thing as it's not the problem anon-monk suggested it was. :-(

I trimmed away too much for the "simplified case" and didn't notice when I oversimplified it because it gave the same error message (even when I had code in the BEGIN phase). *sigh*

So it's back to the drawing board.

Edit Didn't have to go far...seems to have something to do with whether or not another package using the same module (Fields) is present AND my own export routine. I suspected it was in my own export code, but when I substituted the standard Exporter I got the same error -- but only because I'd already removed the 'BEGIN' code.

If you're interested, when I figure out the problem, I can update things here, but it's likely some boring error where I missed something simple. ;-)

-l