I don't quite understand these questions but I have two comments that might be relevant. Please don't treat these as authoritative, though.

(1) did you define $sessionID somewhere else? If not, the script as will fail under strict, as well as your cookie being deficient.

(2) for some reason I don't understand, $badcookie seems to be a hash reference rather than a scalar.

Taking these together I get your script to run amended thus:

use strict;
use CGI qw(:all);
use CGI::Cookie;

# insert definition of $sessionID:
my $sessionID = "hello world";
my ($domain, $name, $value, $expires) = ('65.1.136.248', 'SessionID', 
+$sessionID, '+1Y');
my $cookieheader = new CGI::Cookie(-name => $name,
                                   -value   => $value,
                                   -expires => $expires) || die;
# left out domain so it wd work on my web space

print header(-cookie=>$cookieheader);
my $badcookie = fetch CGI::Cookie('SessionID');

# print $badcookie as hashref, not scalar:
print $badcookie->{'SessionID'};
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§ George Sherston