I very much appreciate the help - but I'm still stuck. I'd done all of the standard troubleshooting stuff I usually do, and is outlined in the guide. None of the earlier posts on this helped (I did a search here and google before I posted this question). I hadn't used CGI::Carp much before, and tried it, with no luck.

The wierd thing about this error is: 1) the script works fine in all but two modes. 2) The script has been working fine for weeks until I upgraded my perl and CGI. 3) The script works fine on a different machine with the same versions of perl and CGI (different distro of Linux - Mandrake instead of debian). and 4) There are no errors that are clear, and sometimes output just stops cold, with no feedback whatever. 5) Plenty of other scripts seem to work just fine.

There's nothing in any log (apache error_log, or syslog) that would help.

So I'm stumped, but I need to solve this problem. I guess I'll have to try some other approaches (I'm not quite sure what...)