I can't reproduce this (Perl 5.8.2, HTML::Template 2.6). Can you verify that even this small test script fails?

You should only get that error if you are passing something other than an array ref as the "options" parameter.. for instance, if you accidentally misplaced the backslash in options => \@options. I'd take a good look at all the things you pass to $template->param with Data::Dumper