I did a trace as you suggested. I must admit my ignorance of this, but simple perusing of the DBI docs showed me how. I found that a typo in my template was causing additional info to be put into the hidden field. It wasn't showing up when I did a simple print of the value because the extra info was valid html. I must admit, I didn't peek at the html source until I saw the trace. When I saw what showed up in the trace, I was able to fix the problem and everything worked as expected.
Thanks for all of your responses. Every time I ask a question, I end up learning many new and valuable things. That is one of the reasons I persevere in learning more about perl.
I will be curling up with the DBI perldoc and probably buying a copy of Programming the Perl DBI from O'Reilly next week as I dig deeper into DB programming with perl.