I have read your question in the morning. Recreated the situation on my Windows 2000 Perl + Apache. It happened just as you described. When you remove the '=' sign, you get only one warning. When you have it, there are two warnings in the error log ;-)

Didn't want to post my comment in the morning, since I had no solution to it ;-)

In a few hours perspective I think that the program you have provided looks a bit odd. I think you should fill the template variables in the template and also fill them from the code. This warning at the end also doesn't look worthwile.