in reply to PERL interpreter not asking for name=value pairs!! -HELP

It looks like the latest version of CGI has changed things a bit. Now you have to use the -debug pragma to get that behavior:

use CGI qw/:standard -debug/;

This is present in version 2.68, to which I upgraded a couple of weeks ago. I believe I read something about this in the changelog, but you'll have to check on the CPAN: CGI.