Hey there, Thanks for the thought, i dont think it is scoping but, in the interest of 'full disclosure' here the code. its a Handler for Apache/mod_perl, however i dont think that this is a problem with that, more LibXML. Anyway, here is the code:

sub start
{   my ($r,$params) = @_;
    # open the database handle and get the data from the table
    my $db=LMS2::Library->open_lms();
    my $cat_sth = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM CompCat ORDER BY descrip
+tion ");
    $cat_sth->execute;

    my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
    my $XMLPath = $r->server_root_relative("LMS2/XML");
    my $location = $r->location();
    my $tree=$parser->parse_file($XMLPath."/Competancy.xml");
    my $first;

   # prepare list of categories
    my @list2 = $tree->findnodes('//select[@id="categoryID"]') ||
                warn "couldnt find any nodes for select & name of cate
+goryID";
    while (my $row=$cat_sth->fetchrow_hashref )
    {
        my $node = XML::LibXML::Element->new('option');
        $node->setAttribute('value',$row->{id});

        if ($row->{id} == $params->{categoryID})
        { $node->setAttribute('selected','selected'); }

        my $text = XML::LibXML::Text->new($row->{description});
        $node->appendChild($text);
        $list2[0]->push($node);
    }

    my $parser2 = XML::LibXSLT->new();
    my $ss=$parser2->parse_stylesheet_file($XMLPath."/HTMLConvert.xsl"
+);
    my $res=$ss->transform($tree);
    my $htmlpage = $ss->output_string($res);
    $htmlpage =~ s/__HOST__/$hn{Host}/gim;
    $r->print($htmlpage);
}
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