You're exactly right. I had previously solved the problem rather inelegantly and just wanted to learn some new perl skills (specifically LWP). However, your suggestion to use Mechanize was right on target.

If the Oreilly people don't like the idea, then I won't post the final code. Otherwise I'll post it here. All in all, Mechanize solved the problem very easily. I'll probably do some research to see why my LWP code failed.

Thanks for the help