I will look more closely at the style/design issues.

You're right, I need something more portable. For the massive retrievals I use LINUX anyway. I am abandoning the Parallel processes until we're ready for multiple CPU's (if ever). After discussing your recent response, the former Perl Guru (I called him that, he would hate it if he knew I used Guru) suggests ParallelUserAgent to perform parallel downloads and then the serial processing. Sound familiar?

This was not a waste of time and is turning out much better than I expected.

Thanks Again