Nope, no strict... If it did anything more than just crash, I would have put up the error message. Perl doesn't give an error message. Windows just spits out a 'fatal exception' or somesuch message (away from that box right now, or i'd say what it was), and the program dies, all open connections are closed. The only info I was able to get was where it crashed (by inserting on every line 'print (line_number);'). i hadn't thought of that ($!), but i'll try it out as soon as i get back to the box.
Thanks,
   --tom