That makes little sense. I've been under the apprehension that use differs from require in that it happens during BEGIN and calls the import method on the package. Your fix strikes me as something that is tenuous and if you don't find the actual problem at least put some comments in the code with perhaps a URL back to this link. I'm imagining that a year later this same code will break for some other reason just because I think the actual difference you're involving is so little. I think I'm going to go back and look at the objects you're loading and see what import() does for each but offhand I'm surprised this makes a difference.