Aha, now something dawned on me. Thanks a lot!

I can't just ignore the return value, because I have to Push something on it later, but I can of course work on a different variable. When I do that, it gets through XML::Simple beautifully indeed! :-) Jihaa!

However, I get a new problem, all this happens in a recursive sub, to go through the response tree. But modifying the underlying hash apparently has the side effect of stopping the recursion... :-( So, now I have a different problem to look into...

Guess I'd just get to work...