Thanks for the reply. I tried the BEGIN pre-compile require and still run into a problem at AutoLoader and vars modules. I seems that Apache, with mod_perl, uses the 5.00503 AutoLoader and vars modules in any case. I also tried to override (with 'use subs...') the function in vars that has the invalid range.

A question I still have is if, possibly via httpd.conf, files in a directory can be served without mod_perl.