Rest assured that the only reason I had that dirty $one in global was because I stripped the script to the bare minimum to try and figure out what was going wrong.

The only globals the entire script has are $dbh, $sth, $rc for database calls, and $conf and %conf.
$conf contains the hash from my config file and %conf is my CGI params grabbed from CGI->vars.

I think for now I'm going to experiment with both cLive ;-)'s suggestion of containing my config data in a module of it's own, and I think I'll also try out setting the $conf reference to a global.

my $main::conf;
unless ($::conf = do ('/home/4220/straitwa/www.straitway.net/shop_34/c
+on
+f.pl')) {
  die ("Could not open config file");
}
[download]

I'd appreciate anybody's opinion on whether having five global variables is a bad thing. - I mean, should I really aim to have no globals or is that overkill.

I realise that my whole problem here was my misunderstanding that my $foo declared in the main package doesn't make it the same as $main::foo
I greatly appreciate everyone's help here,
Thanks!

fireartist