Thanks for confirming that I'm not the only one who can't make it work as advertised. I did briefly take a look at the .pm file to see if I could see anything obviously broken, but alas I was not. (But I also noticed the documentation was a little, er, inconsistent.) Hopefully the author will correct the problem, if it truly is a bug as jeffa's analysis points to.

I have indeed fallen back to using XML::Simple. Thanks again.