i don't know much about perl OO, but it seems to me like your test box was not caching the perl mod and the production box does...as per the thread by perrin. basically (in a cached mod_perl environment) global variables persist across sessions/programs (which are using the same instance of the perl binary. In such an environment the first thing you should do is see if you are running as such and re-initialize variables, being careful about DBI especially, as it can separately (from perl) cache db handles. the usual way of doing this is to set a variable in the top of the code just after testing if it's been set. E.g. if ($been_here) {reinitialize stuff} else {$been_here=1; initialize stuff} rest of code goes here. It will make more sense to you probably if you write a little re-entrant form processor cgi, i.e. the form is spat out by the cgi and the submit also goes to the cgi. hope some of this has made sense.