Thanks for the tips, Amel.
What's particularly troubling is that running this from the command line on an AS Perl 5.006001 box *does* give the correct results, including the "4". (I know there could be differences in installation, etc., but one step at a time...)
This just in:
I asked the admins to run this script from the command line on the IIS server, and they got:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
1<br>2<br>3<br>4<br>5<br>6<br></body></html>
So... the difference *seems* to be in the CGI-serving of the results to the client via the browser. (A fair assessment?)
Some difference in the Perl environment running under IIS, or similar???
Thanks again. - Mush